MSNBC host Ali Velshi recently cracked up his crew while slamming former President Donald Trump for bragging about getting the coveted — and entirely made-up — Hannibal Lecter endorsement via Media Ite.
It has been noted that a passage from Trump’s Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire is being widely pilloried as echoing the likes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini— and garnered several weeks worth of headlines in just a few days.
It’s part of a broader pattern of gaffes and “extremist statements” that President Joe Biden’s campaign has been pressuring the media to cover.
On this week’s edition of MSNBC’s Velshi, the host delivered a lengthy commentary that included many such statements, including one chunk that drew off-camera guffaws over one of the more oddball fact-checks to come along in awhile — the claim that Hannibal Lecter “loves Donald Trump”:
“ALI VELSHI: Then there was this at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, this month.
DONALD TRUMP: Has anybody seen Silence of the Lambs? Hannibal Lecter. How great an actor was he? You know why I like him? Because he said on television on an — one of the — “I love Donald Trump!”.
So I love him! I love him!
ALI VELSHI: Hannibal Lecter said that.
(off-camera laughter).
It does seem that Trump got mixed up about the actor who played the cannibal in the 1991 film. But who really knows? Because Anthony Hopkins never actually publicly supported Trump. Neither did Mads Mikkelsen or Brian Cox, the other actors who portrayed Hannibal Lecter in the past.
In fact, Cox is on record calling Donald Trump a, quote, “effing a-hole and, quote, “so full of” rhymes with spit.
It’s easy to dismiss the wide gaps in Trump’s logic and his many head-scratching mistakes because of what we’ve come to expect from him. But even though he can’t seem to keep a lot of things straight lately, he has this remarkable ability to echo white nationalist, racist rhetoric with pinpoint accuracy. This happened during a speech on Veterans Day.
DONALD TRUMP: We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country like vermin.
ALI VELSHI: Trump’s use of dehumanizing language is nothing new, but critics and scholars were very quick to point out that Vermin is a specific and particularly loaded term with an ugly history. It’s a word that was used in a similar context by dictators like Adolf Hitler, who said in 1934, quote, “If I can send the flowers of the German nation into hell of war without the smallest pity, surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.”.
Hitler, in this instance was referring to the Jewish people as part of his campaign against them, which essentially paved the way for the Holocaust.
Disturbingly, the comparisons with Hitler don’t end there. During an interview with a right-wing website last month, Trump said that undocumented immigrants were, quote, “poisoning the blood of the country.”.
It’s an idea that’s lifted straight out of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. As the fact-checking website Snopes pointed out, Hitler’s manifesto included multiple passages that made similar references about how the Jewish people were poisoning the bloodstream of Germany. For example, in Chapter four, Hitler wrote, quote, “It seemed as if some all-pervasive, all-pervading poisonous fluid had been injected by some mysterious hands into the bloodstream of this once heroic body.”.
It would be foolish for anyone to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, to allow him to give the excuse of ignorance at this point in his political career, not after he stood up for the racists and the anti-Semites who terrorized Charlottesville in 2017 and not after he dined with the white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West last year.
There are people out there who are watching Donald Trump’s actions and listening to the kind of dangerous rhetoric he spews, like David DePape, who was convicted this week for violently assaulting Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi. He testified in court that he was radicalized by conspiracy theories that he found on right-wing media. And here’s what Donald Trump had to say about the Paul Pelosi attack earlier this week.
DONALD TRUMP: And, you know, we had no terror during my administration. The only terror we had was Nancy Pelosi as a crazed lunatic. She’s a lunatic. She is a crazed lunatic. What the hell was going on with her husband? Let’s not ask. Let’s not ask. I withdraw that statement. By the way, she’s got a wall around her house. Obviously, in that case, it didn’t work very well.
ALI VELSHI: He’s mocking an attempted killing of Nancy Pelosi’s husband. What’s more chilling than Trump’s words is the crowd, that enraptured crowd cheering him on.
Donald Trump is shameless. He’s driven purely by his own self-preservation. And if we do not heed the warnings of history, he is going to continue to drag this entire country down with him.”
