Trump treats everyone and everything like he treats golf. You get in a golf match with Trump, he’ll try to cheat and he’ll welch on the bet if you win. He has done this consistently, his one consistent play is to take advantage of people who rely on “norms” that people “always do.” There are always new people that will fall for this con.
If he jumps the line to get ahead of you and you don’t stop him, he thinks it proves that he’s smarter than you. I presume the professional psychologists have a word for that.
It all makes sense now! Well, maybe not.
Trump keeps unlocking Captain America-style supersoldiers to do his bidding every time he mentions Lecter
Which leaves just one explanation. “The late great Hannibal Lecter, he’s a lovely man, he’d love to have you for dinner,” is actually a trigger sequence for an army of insurrectionist sleeper agents who have been brainwashed by Russian scientists, and once they’ve heard him say it 35 times they’ll burn Washington to the ground. This is almost certainly the case, and may God have mercy on all our souls.
It makes as much sense as any other theory I guess.
I just came across this video in my YT feed, with a possible explanation as to what exactly is up with trump’s constant referencing of Hannibal Lector.
It’s only a minute and a half, but if you don’t want to watch the video, the theory is that trump is conflating the two meanings of asylum: one of which is immigrants seeking asylum, and the other being insane asylums, and trump keeps claiming that other countries are emptying out theirs to send the patients to the U.S. And in trump’s weird word salad associations, what well-known fictional character escaped from an insane asylum? Why, Hannibal Lector, of course.
That still doesn’t account for how Trump seems to think that Hannibal Lector is good, though.
I think that part of it is just trolling us anti-trumpers.
But trying to figure out exactly what trump is trying to get at with the crazy word salad free association riffing he does makes my head hurt. I’m still puzzling over the ‘boat battery vs. shark’ thing.
That one can be understood, if you dumb it down enough. Electric vehicles = bad. Sharks = bad. Boats sinking = bad. Therefore electric boats makes the boat sink and everyone gets eaten by sharks.
It still doesn’t work with Lector, though.
Maybe Lector/Lecter = good because face-eating leopard = good?
I didn’t think Hannibal Lecter would eat my brain!
And with ketchup instead of fava beans. 
I thought it was, “if the electric boat sinks, the boat will electrify the water which will be instant death for anyone who falls/jumps in too near the boat. To avoid this they swim away from the boat (to where the sharks are).”
It’s a pretty standard “I don’t like new things, so I’m going to pretend they are death traps because of convoluted scenario that I made up” story. In the same line as, “windmills cause cancer” and “seat belts might jam as you are sinking into a lake” stories.
Well, similar to the oddity of trump seemingly depicting Hannibal Lector as good, the thing that perplexes me about the boat battery vs. shark thing is that, at least in the version I heard, he depicts dealing with the shark as the worse fate-- “I’ll take electrocution every single time”. You’d think, since the point is to denigrate electric vehicles, he’d say “I’ll take my chances with the shark”.
But, trying to suss out logic in the things he says is a fool’s errand.
Also, I love how in that ‘Shark vs. Battery’ clip he twice says about the unnamed guy he’s talking to in the anecdote “he said ‘nobody ever asked me that question before’”. Yeah, I bet no one ever did 
Here’s my guess. One of Trump’s speechwriters probably wrote a joke about Hannibal Lecter that made sense. But when Trump was delivering the speech he got confused and screwed up the joke.
I’m waiting for the future anecdote Trump will share about when Hannibal Lecter fought an electric shark.
The Silence of the Mechajaws.
It’ll do fantastic business with incredible ratings! Why hasn’t it been made, yet?
And like every good comedian, when a joke falls flat, he immediately tries to tell it again in a different way so that maybe they’ll get it this time.
“I’ll take electrocution every single time”
Okay, then.
Maybe if he shoots someone on 5th Avenue…
Even Trump seems to be saying this now (of course, he is probably just covering for saying stupid shit)
You know what would REALLY trigger me and a bunch of anti-trumpers? If he started each rally by punching himself in the balls. Really hard. Boy that would really make me mad.
And if he slammed his head on the podium, that would just infuriate me. Man, I hope he does not do these things.