The final night of last week’s Republican National Convention felt less like a political coronation and more like a rerun of I Love the ’80s. Onstage, wrestler Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt and roared into the mic, stumping for fellow garish ’80s personality Donald Trump.
As viewers wondered whether they were hallucinating, Hogan reminisced about a scene that took place during both men’s glory era. “The last time I was up onstage, Donald Trump was sitting ringside at the Trump Plaza, I was bleeding like a pig, and I had won the world title right in front of Donald J. Trump,” he said. He was presumably referencing one of Trump’s late-1980s WrestleMania appearances—which, technically speaking, actually took place at Atlantic City Convention Hall (though they were billed as taking place at Trump Plaza).
The RNC was full of other talismans from four decades ago, when Trump was atop the zeitgeist. Linda McMahon, the WWE matriarch who began doing business with Trump back then, said from the podium that Trump is “a fighter” with “the heart of a lion and the soul of a warrior.” Lee Greenwood, the Grammy-winning country singer best known for his early ’80s political-campaign hit, “God Bless the USA,” performed that 40-year-old track.
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When Trump wanted to connect with younger audience members, he broke out a not-so-current movie reference—likening migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial-killer-slash-cannibal popularized in the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs. Somehow, Trump’s actual statements about Lecter are even more alarming than that sentence would have you believe.
“The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner,” Trump said of the fictional cannibal, whom he has been name-dropping on the 2024 campaign trail in what New York magazine called one of the former president’s “most bizarre and baffling” rally rants.
He remixed the reference to the character, famously played by Anthony Hopkins, at other campaign events to similarly nonsensical effect. “The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man,” Trump said in Wildwood, New Jersey, as if he was toasting an old friend who recently passed away instead of a homicidal fictional stranger. For a folksy spin, he added, “He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner.” For some reason, Trump offered Lecter a “congratulations,” and, in other venues, has reportedly described him as “legendary” and “a nice fellow.” (Hopkins has said Trump’s statements “shocked and appalled” him.)