M.L. Nestel joined Raw Story in 2023. An award-winning writer and editor, his work has been published in New York Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and The Guardian, among other titles. He also produces and writes for true-crime genre TV shows. Prior to that, he served on the Newsweek masthead as a senior writer, wrote as a correspondent at ABC News and held the titles of West Coast bureau chief and senior writer at The Daily Beast. Priors also include working as senior national correspondent at The Daily Mail and investigative reporter at all three NYC tabloids: The New York Post,The New York Daily News and Newsday. He traveled around the country as a national correspondent at The Daily. M.L. published hundreds of stories about underground music and cinema — most notably as a critic for Box Office Magazine and the New York editor at Soma Magazine. He also headed development at Fountainhead Films. M.L. splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.
"'Silence of the Lambs' — has anyone ever seen a 'Silence of the Lambs?','" Trump asked.
"The late great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man," Trump told the crowd referring to the cannibal. "He oftentimes would 'have a friend for dinner' — remember the last scene 'Excuse me, I'm about to have a friend for dinner!' and this poor doctor walks by — 'I'm about to have a friend for dinner!'"
The trajectory of how Trump brought up a madman in a movie from 1991 came after he waxed about immigrants flooding into the country that had been committed.
“They’re emptying out their mental institutions into the United States, our beautiful country,” Trump 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 — you know what the difference is, right? An insane asylum is a mental institution on steroids.”
And so when the presumptive Republican nominee and minted convict appeared in Washington D.C. on Thursday to speak to the House Republican caucus — he reportedly complimented Hannibal Lecter. Again.
"Apparently, the former president made reference to Hannibal Lecter and said, nice guy, quote, he even had a friend over for dinner," CNN's Jim Acosta reported Wednesday morning. "So we've seen Trump out on the campaign trail praising Hannibal Lecter."
"Apparently, he did it again this morning," he added. "Not sure we fully understand the context of that."
But Watters maintains it was more "fake news".
"We weren't inside the room," said Watters. "But neither was CNN. And that's the point."
He continued: "So we do what journalists do — we went to our sources who were actually there."
He then asked what was asked of the sources: Did Trump really call a flesh-eating serial killer a nice guy?"
Watters answered his own question.
"No. Trump was joking that if he said something about Hannibal Lecter the fake news media would say he was praising him. And CNN took the bait."
