Reaching for racist rhetoric bizarre even for him, Donald Trump compared undocumented migrants to the US to Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer and cannibal famously played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Oscar-winning 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs.

“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums,” the former president and probable Republican presidential nominee claimed in an interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network on Monday. “You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff.

“Hannibal Lecter? Anybody know Hannibal Lecter?”

To laughter from the audience at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump added: “We don’t want ’em in this country.”

Trump has made such statements before, including in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland last month. As framed to Right Side, they were the latest piece of extremist and dehumanizing invective from a candidate seeking to make immigration a core issue of the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump has a long history of such racist statements, having launched his successful 2016 presidential campaign by describing Mexicans crossing the southern border as rapists and drug dealers.

His liking for Lecter led him to claim, at a rally last October, that the actor who played the character “said on television, ‘I love Donald Trump’, so I love him”.

Hopkins has not publicly said he loves Trump. In 2018, he told the Guardian: “I don’t vote because I don’t trust anyone.” Brian Cox, another actor to have played Lecter on screen, has called Trump “such a fucking asshole” and “so full of shit”.

In 2016, Mads Mikkelsen, who played Lecter on television, told CBS News that though he could “definitely laugh at some of the stuff [Trump] says”, he “can also go, ‘Oh my God, did he say that?’ I think he’s a fresh wind for some people.”

Trump is an alleged serial offender, facing 91 criminal charges as he runs for office.

Yet despite those charges (17 for election subversion, 40 for retention of classified information, 34 for hush-money payments to an adult film star) and multimillion-dollar civil penalties over his business affairs and a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”, Trump dominates the Republican primary.

He also leads Joe Biden in most general election polling – surveys subject to warnings from experts about sampling techniques and accuracy so far out from election day.

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Trump spoke to Right Side the night before Super Tuesday, when 16 states and one territory were scheduled to hold primary votes. Trump’s last, pulverised Republican opponent, Nikki Haley, was widely expected to end her campaign soon after.

Stay up to date on all of Donald Trump’s trials. Guardian staff will send weekly updates each Thursday – as well as bonus editions on major trial days.

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As in his successful run for president in 2016, Trump is seeking to use problems at the southern border – high numbers of arrivals from Central America presented as a crisis, real or not – as a central campaign issue.

At his direction, Senate Republicans sank a bipartisan deal on border and immigration reform. House Republicans have refused to move on the issue.

Biden has sought to emphasise Trump and Republicans’ refusal to work on solving the border problem. The president’s campaign has also repeatedly slammed Trump for using far-right, fascistic language when discussing migrants, including a repeated claim migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The Biden campaign directly compared those remarks to Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric during his rise to power in Germany.

Speaking to Right Side, Trump repeated another campaign-trail complaint, about languages spoken by migrants to the US.

“We don’t even have teachers of some of these languages,” he said. “Who would think that? We have languages that are, like, from, from the planet Mars? Nobody, nobody knows how to, you know, speak it.”

On Trump’s father’s side, his ancestors spoke German. His mother was also a migrant, growing up in the Scottish islands, in a household that spoke Gaelic. His first wife, Ivana Trump, the mother of his three oldest children, spoke Czech. Melania Trump, his third wife and the mother of his son Barron, is Slovenian.

Trump also made a blatantly false claim about everyday life in cities where large numbers of migrants have arrived, many bussed or flown in by Republican governors.

“We have children that are no longer going to school,” Trump said. “They’re throwing them out of the park. There’s no more Little Leagues [children’s baseball], there’s no more sports, there’s no more life in New York and so many of these cities.”