An interesting explanation I've come across recently for why Trump started bringing up Hannibal Lecter, which seems to be part of the fact that he's started bringing up foreign "insane asylums" (as sources of immigrants to the USA) in general lately: he probably seriously thinks that's what seeking "asylum" as an immigrant or refugee is about, because the word "asylum" appears in both contexts. It reminds me of when he saw "ramparts" on a teleprompter, didn't know the word, and replaced it with "airports". In that case it was two separate words, one of which he didn't know, instead of two usages for the same word, which he doesn't know the difference between, but the general process & outcome was the same: putting a word or word-usage in the wrong context where it doesn't make sense because he's acting as if it were the one word or word-usage & context that he does know.
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Unrelated to that: Of all the Republicans he could have chosen among for VP, how did he end up at Vance, who has such a strange background and whom most Republican voters don't even like? A possible part of the answer: he really didn't have many choices among Republican politicians, because most Republican politicians, secretly or not, don't like or respect him. It's only the voters who do. More interestingly & insightfully, Chris Cillizza has pointed out that Trump loves a redemption story, with "redemption" defined as "switching from being negative about Trump to being positive about Trump". CC pointed out a series of other cases in Trump's history in which he's made a particular point of promoting people who had previously spoken in public against Trump but then changed their ways. And Vance's turnaround on that subject might be the biggest one of all (among high-level politicians).
