Trump praises fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter during rally speech
Ex-president calls Hopkins’ cannibalistic Lecter ‘late, great’ while condemning ‘people who are being released into our country’
Edward Helmore
Ex-president calls Hopkins’ cannibalistic Lecter ‘late, great’ while condemning ‘people who are being released into our country’
Edward Helmore
Sun 12 May 2024
THE GUARDIAN
Donald Trump on Saturday praised fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter “as a wonderful man” before segueing into comments disparaging people who have immigrated into the US without permission.
The former president’s remarks to political rally-goers in Wildwood, New Jersey, as he challenges Joe Biden’s re-election in November were a not-so-subtle rhetorical bridge exalting Anthony Hopkins’ cannibalistic Lecter in Silence of the Lambs as “late [and] great” while simultaneously condemning “people who are being released into our country that we don’t want”.
Trump delivered his address to an estimated crowd of about 80,000 supporters under the shadow of the Great White roller coaster in a 1950s-kitsch seaside resort 90 miles (144.8km) south of Philadelphia.
The occasion served for Trump to renew his stated admiration for Lecter, as he’s done before, after the actor Mads Mikkelsen – who previously portrayed Lecter in a television series – once described Trump as “a fresh wind for some people”.
Among other comments, Trump on Sunday also repeated exaggerations about having “been indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone”, the violent Prohibition-era Chicago mob boss.
Trump since the spring of 2023 has grappled with four indictments attributing more than 80 criminal charges to him for attempts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election he lost to Biden, retaining classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments to an adult film actor which prosecutors maintain were illicitly covered up.
The trial over the hush money is set to enter its fourth week Monday.
Yet Capone was indicted at least six times before his famous 1931 tax evasion conviction.
Trump nonetheless used the occasion to call the charges against him “bullshit”, with spectators then chanting the word back at him.
The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that the former president’s supporters had poured into Wildwood in “pickup trucks decked out in Trump flags” from up and down the east coast.
According to the outlet, hundreds of people set up camp overnight on the boardwalk to get into the event.
“The country is headed in the wrong direction,” Kelly Carter-Currier, a 62-year-old retired teacher from New Hampshire, told the Inquirer. “So, hopefully, people will get their shit together and vote the right person in. And if they don’t, I don’t know. World War III?”
On the other hand, New Jersey Democrats dismissed the significance of the event.
Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill said many of the Trump supporters expected would be from out of state. “Jersey is not going to be a welcoming place for Trump,” Sherrill said.
Sherrill’s fellow New Jersey Democrat Andy Kim, a congressman running for the US Senate, said that generalized apathy toward government helped Trump’s support.
“I hope people recognize that he is not somebody that has an agenda that’s going to lead to a better type of politics,” Kim said.
Donald Trump on Saturday praised fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter “as a wonderful man” before segueing into comments disparaging people who have immigrated into the US without permission.
The former president’s remarks to political rally-goers in Wildwood, New Jersey, as he challenges Joe Biden’s re-election in November were a not-so-subtle rhetorical bridge exalting Anthony Hopkins’ cannibalistic Lecter in Silence of the Lambs as “late [and] great” while simultaneously condemning “people who are being released into our country that we don’t want”.
Trump delivered his address to an estimated crowd of about 80,000 supporters under the shadow of the Great White roller coaster in a 1950s-kitsch seaside resort 90 miles (144.8km) south of Philadelphia.
The occasion served for Trump to renew his stated admiration for Lecter, as he’s done before, after the actor Mads Mikkelsen – who previously portrayed Lecter in a television series – once described Trump as “a fresh wind for some people”.
Among other comments, Trump on Sunday also repeated exaggerations about having “been indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone”, the violent Prohibition-era Chicago mob boss.
Trump since the spring of 2023 has grappled with four indictments attributing more than 80 criminal charges to him for attempts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election he lost to Biden, retaining classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments to an adult film actor which prosecutors maintain were illicitly covered up.
The trial over the hush money is set to enter its fourth week Monday.
Yet Capone was indicted at least six times before his famous 1931 tax evasion conviction.
Trump nonetheless used the occasion to call the charges against him “bullshit”, with spectators then chanting the word back at him.
The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that the former president’s supporters had poured into Wildwood in “pickup trucks decked out in Trump flags” from up and down the east coast.
According to the outlet, hundreds of people set up camp overnight on the boardwalk to get into the event.
“The country is headed in the wrong direction,” Kelly Carter-Currier, a 62-year-old retired teacher from New Hampshire, told the Inquirer. “So, hopefully, people will get their shit together and vote the right person in. And if they don’t, I don’t know. World War III?”
On the other hand, New Jersey Democrats dismissed the significance of the event.
Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill said many of the Trump supporters expected would be from out of state. “Jersey is not going to be a welcoming place for Trump,” Sherrill said.
Sherrill’s fellow New Jersey Democrat Andy Kim, a congressman running for the US Senate, said that generalized apathy toward government helped Trump’s support.
“I hope people recognize that he is not somebody that has an agenda that’s going to lead to a better type of politics,” Kim said.
Trump Says He’d Deport ‘Anti-American’ Protesters in Bizarre Rally Speech
TO WHERE?!!
Jeremy Childs
ROLING STONE
Sat, May 11, 2024
Much like the college administrators who called the cops on student protesters, Donald Trump’s solution to quash any political uprising appears to be using the force of the state.
While speaking about Israel’s war in Gaza during a campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey on Saturday, Trump criticized the pro-Palestine protests on American college campuses, saying, “When I’m president, we will not allow colleges to be taken over by violent radicals.”
“If you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism, or anti-Americanism, or antisemitism to our campuses we will immediately deport you, you’ll be out of that school,” Trump continued.
Trump also alleged the campus protesters are being funded by President Joe Biden’s political donors, echoing a Politico story that Rolling Stone debunked. He has previously compared the campus protesters at Columbia University to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, although he distinguishes the former as destructive and damaging and the latter group as “unbelievable patriots.”
Trump also criticized Biden’s decision to withhold a shipment of bombs to Israel due to its planned invasion of Rafah.
“Crooked Joe’s action is one of the worst betrayals of an American ally in the history of our country,” Trump said. “I support Israel’s right to win its war on terror, is that OK?”
Sat, May 11, 2024
Much like the college administrators who called the cops on student protesters, Donald Trump’s solution to quash any political uprising appears to be using the force of the state.
While speaking about Israel’s war in Gaza during a campaign rally in Wildwood, New Jersey on Saturday, Trump criticized the pro-Palestine protests on American college campuses, saying, “When I’m president, we will not allow colleges to be taken over by violent radicals.”
“If you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism, or anti-Americanism, or antisemitism to our campuses we will immediately deport you, you’ll be out of that school,” Trump continued.
Trump also alleged the campus protesters are being funded by President Joe Biden’s political donors, echoing a Politico story that Rolling Stone debunked. He has previously compared the campus protesters at Columbia University to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, although he distinguishes the former as destructive and damaging and the latter group as “unbelievable patriots.”
Trump also criticized Biden’s decision to withhold a shipment of bombs to Israel due to its planned invasion of Rafah.
“Crooked Joe’s action is one of the worst betrayals of an American ally in the history of our country,” Trump said. “I support Israel’s right to win its war on terror, is that OK?”
Tens of thousands of people were in attendance for the rally held in the coastal city on the tip of the South Jersey Shore, with the Trump campaign claiming up to 80,000 people showed up to hear the presumptive GOP presidential nominee speak.
In addition to criticizing Biden’s response to the conflict in Gaza, Trump also spent much of his speech lambasting the Biden administration’s environmental policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s new guidelines to increase the number of electric vehicles on the roads, calling it Biden’s “insane electric vehicle mandate.” The oil and gas industry is reportedly writing executive orders to roll back Biden’s environmental policies in a second Trump administration.
Trump also took a moment to praise the villain of the 1991 horror film The Silence of the Lambs in one of the more bizarre tangents of the evening. Trump had been discussing Biden’s “open border,” alleging that criminals and “people from insane asylums and mental institutions” were coming into the U.S., a popular topic in his rally speeches.
“”Has anybody ever seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man,” Trump said. “He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner.”
The moment is not the first time Trump has mentioned Lecter during a campaign stop, having referenced him in an apparent mix-up with the actor who portrayed the character, Anthony Hopkins, during a speech in Iowa last October. Trump wrapped up the tangent by saying, “Congratulations, the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
The rally comes after the fourth week of Trump’s hush money trial, where the former president is charged on suspicion of 34 counts of falsifying business records stemming from payments made to former porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. Daniels took the witness stand herself this week, recapping her encounter with Trump and undergoing cross-examination by his legal team.
New York Times: Trump could owe more than $100 million in taxes as a result of IRS inquiry
Eric Bradner, CNN
Sat, May 11, 2024
Qian Jun/MB Media/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump could owe more than $100 million in taxes as a result of a yearslong Internal Revenue Service inquiry into claims of huge losses on his Chicago skyscraper, The New York Times and ProPublica reported Saturday.
The news organizations reported Trump claimed massive financial losses twice — first on his 2008 tax return, when he said the building, then mired in debt, was “worthless,” and again after 2010, when he had shifted its ownership into a new partnership also controlled by Trump.
The 2008 claim resulted in Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, and there is no indication it drew an IRS challenge, the outlets reported. Then, Trump’s lawyers enabled further claims of losses in 2010 by shifting the Chicago tower into another partnership, “DJT Holdings LLC,” The Times and ProPublica reported.
In the years that followed, other Trump businesses, including golf courses, would be shifted into that same partnership — which his lawyers used as the basis to claim more tax-reducing losses from the Chicago tower. That move sparked the IRS inquiry. Those losses added up to $168 million over the next decade, the report said.
The outlets calculated the revision sought by the IRS could result in a tax bill of more than $100 million.
The only public mention of the IRS audit into Trump’s Chicago tower loss claims came in a December 2022 congressional report that The Times and ProPublica reported made an unexplained reference to the section of tax law at issue in the case. That mention, the outlets reported, confirmed the audit was still underway.
“This matter was settled years ago, only to be brought back to life once my father ran for office. We are confident in our position, which is supported by opinion letters from various tax experts, including the former general counsel of the IRS,” Trump’s son Eric Trump, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told The Times and ProPublica in a statement.
Eric Bradner, CNN
Sat, May 11, 2024
Qian Jun/MB Media/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump could owe more than $100 million in taxes as a result of a yearslong Internal Revenue Service inquiry into claims of huge losses on his Chicago skyscraper, The New York Times and ProPublica reported Saturday.
The news organizations reported Trump claimed massive financial losses twice — first on his 2008 tax return, when he said the building, then mired in debt, was “worthless,” and again after 2010, when he had shifted its ownership into a new partnership also controlled by Trump.
The 2008 claim resulted in Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, and there is no indication it drew an IRS challenge, the outlets reported. Then, Trump’s lawyers enabled further claims of losses in 2010 by shifting the Chicago tower into another partnership, “DJT Holdings LLC,” The Times and ProPublica reported.
In the years that followed, other Trump businesses, including golf courses, would be shifted into that same partnership — which his lawyers used as the basis to claim more tax-reducing losses from the Chicago tower. That move sparked the IRS inquiry. Those losses added up to $168 million over the next decade, the report said.
The outlets calculated the revision sought by the IRS could result in a tax bill of more than $100 million.
The only public mention of the IRS audit into Trump’s Chicago tower loss claims came in a December 2022 congressional report that The Times and ProPublica reported made an unexplained reference to the section of tax law at issue in the case. That mention, the outlets reported, confirmed the audit was still underway.
“This matter was settled years ago, only to be brought back to life once my father ran for office. We are confident in our position, which is supported by opinion letters from various tax experts, including the former general counsel of the IRS,” Trump’s son Eric Trump, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told The Times and ProPublica in a statement.
No comments:
Post a Comment