In Wildwood, Trump compared migrants to Hannibal Lecter and claimed they’re all escaping from ‘insane asylums’

On Saturday evening, at his largest campaign rally to date, former President Donald Trump promised the massive crowd on Wildwoods beach that he would cut taxes, reduce inflation, and straighten our country.

And he also praised fictional cannibal and serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the 1991 horror film Silence of the Lambs, and called him a “wonderful man.”

Trump’s comment came as he discussed border insecurity and warned the crowd — estimated between 80,000 to 100,000 — that migrants crossing the southern border and coming into the United States had been released from mental asylums.

“They’re emptying out their mental institutions into the United States, our beautiful country,” he said. “And now the prison populations all over the world are down. They don’t want to report that the mental institution population is down because they’re taking people from insane asylums and from mental institutions.”

He went on to compare migrants to Lecter — “we have people that being released into our country, that we don’t want in country” — as he did at the Conservative Political Action Conference back in February.

In his third campaign rally since his trial started, the former president reminded the crowd that the character Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, would often times would “have a friend for dinner,” who he would then kill and cannibalize.

» READ MORE: In Wildwood, Donald Trump makes false claim about Penn protests, blasts Chris Christie and Larry Krasner

New Jersey is a decidedly democratic state although Cape May County has voted Republican since 2000. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee lost New Jersey to Biden in 2020 by 16 points but predicted he would win the state come November.

“As you can see today, we’re expanding the electoral map because … we’re going to win the state of New Jersey,” he said on Saturday.