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Donald Trump on Saturday praised fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter “as a wonderful person” before moving on to comments disparaging people who immigrated to the US without permission.
The former president’s remarks to political rally attendees in Wildwood, New Jersey, while challenging Joe Biden’s re-election in November, were a not-so-thin rhetorical bridge praising Anthony Hopkins’ cannibal Lecter in The silence of the Lambs such as “late [and] great,” while condemning “people being let into our country that we don’t want.”
Trump delivered his address to a crowd of about 80,000 supporters – according to one estimate from a Wildwood city spokesman – under the shadow of the Great White Roller Coaster at the kitschy 1950s seaside resort 90 miles (145 km) south from Philadelphia. The crowd began to thin significantly as Trump spoke, a reporter for X’s Philadelphia Inquirer wrote in a post that contained video people who left the rally site.
The occasion served as Trump to renew his stated admiration for Lecter, as he has done before, after actor Mads Mikkelsen – who previously portrayed Lecter in a TV series – once described Trump as “a breath of fresh air for some people.”
Among other comments, Trump on Sunday also repeated exaggerations about being “charged more than the great Alphonse Capone,” Chicago’s violent Prohibition-era mob boss.
Since the spring of 2023, Trump has been fighting four indictments charging him with more than 80 criminal charges for trying to sway the outcome of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden, keeping classified material after his presidency and secret payments of an adult film actor that prosecutors say was illegally covered up.
The trial over the hush money is set to enter its fourth week on Monday.
Yet Capone was indicted at least six times before his famous 1931 tax evasion conviction.
However, Trump used the occasion to call the allegations against him “nonsense,” after which viewers chanted the word back at him.
The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that supporters of the former president poured into Wildwood in “pickup trucks emblazoned with Trump flags” from up and down the East Coast.
According to the publication, hundreds of people camped out overnight on the boardwalk to get into the event.
“The country is moving in the wrong direction,” Kelly Carter-Currier, a 62-year-old retired teacher from New Hampshire, told the Inquirer. “So hopefully people will come together and vote for the right person. And if they don’t, I don’t know. Third World war?”
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On the other hand, New Jersey Democrats dismissed the significance of the event.
Congressman Mickey Sherrill said many of Trump’s expected supporters will be from other states. “Jersey will not be a welcoming place for Trump,” Sherrill said.
Sherrill’s colleague, New Jersey Democrat Andy Kim, a congressman running for the U.S. Senate, said generalized apathy toward government has helped shore up Trump’s support.
“I hope people will recognize that he is not someone who has an agenda that will lead to a better type of politics,” Kim said.
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