The Atlantic

‘Nothing Is Going to Stop Donald Trump’

The former president’s rally in Hialeah, Florida, showed yet again that no other Republican is quite like him.
Source: Alon Skuy / Getty

“Anybody ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?” former President Donald Trump asked last night. “He was a nice fellow. But that’s what’s coming into our country right now.”

The leader of the Republican Party—and quite likely the 2024 GOP nominee—was on an extended rant about mental institutions, prisons, and, to use his phrase, “empty insane asylums.” Speaking to thousands of die-hard supporters at a rally in South Florida, Trump lamented that, under President Joe Biden, the United States has become “the dumping ground of the world.” That he had casually praised one of the most infamous psychopathic serial killers in cinema history was but an aside, brushed over and forgotten.  

This was a dystopian, at times gothic speech. It droned on for nearly 90 minutes. Trump attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. Those unnamed people were similar to, yet different from, the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C.—a place Trump famously despises, and to which he nonetheless longs to

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