NEW DELHI:
Over the years,
Robert De Niro
has portrayed many iconic roles. He’s the first (and only) person to win an Oscar for Best Actor while playing a role in which the main character spoke no English, when he played a young Vito Corleone in The Godfather 2. His Travis Bickle is still the stereotype of a lost generation of American men, a racist Vietnam vet with an axe to grind with society.
He immemorable as Al Capone in The Untouchables or as Irish gangster Jimmy Conway in The Goodfellas. But these days, De Niro plays one role and only one role:
Donald Trump
’s instigator-in-chief.
The 80-year-old was at his pugnacious best outside the New York courthouse where Donald Trump’s hush-money trial was on and didn’t hold back any punches. De Niro, who has even provided the voice over for Biden’s campaign warning about the return of Donald Trump stated: “When Trump ran in 2016, it was like a joke. The only way to preserve our freedoms and hold on to our humanity is to vote for
Joe Biden
for president. If he gets in. I can tell you right now, he will never leave. Is that the country we want to live in? Do we want him running this country and saying ‘I’m not leaving? I’m dictator for life?”
De Niro added: “Under Trump, this kind of government will perish from the earth. I don’t mean to scare you. No, no, wait – maybe I do mean to scare you. If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted. And elections? Forget about it.”
He even channelled his inner
Jake LaMotta
to claim: “You think Trump ever threw a punch himself or took one? No way. He doesn’t get blood on his hands. He directs the mob to do his dirty work for him by making a suggestion, an inference.”
Reacting Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social: ““I never knew how small, both mentally and physically, Wacko Former Actor Robert De Niro was. Today, De Niro, who suffers from an incurable case of
TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME
, commonly known in the medical community as TDS, was met, outside the Courthouse, with a force far greater than the Radical Left - MAGA. “Robert, whose movies, artistry, and brand have gone WAY DOWN IN VALUE since he entered the political arena at the request of Crooked Joe Biden, looked so pathetic and sad out there. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio!!!
De Niro also clashed with Trump supporters outside the court.
Was it a good idea?
Commentators on the other hand think that De Niro’s performance outside the courthouse was uncalled for and detrimental to the Biden cause.
David Axelrod
, a former Obama adviser and the chief of his presidential campaign in 2008 and 2012, felt that casting De Niro right outside the court was “grossly ill-timed”. He also wondered why Team Biden – that’s trying to appeal to Gen Z – would pick another octogenarian to fight their battles. He also called De Niro’s battle with Trump supporters outside the court “great fodder for SNL” He added that Trump’s “legal problems, anti-democratic impulses and character deficiencies” were already baked in the cake, and citing issues closer to home (like cost of living or abortion rights) would be more helpful.
A column in
USA Today
agrees stating that De Niro’s words not only undermined the democracy by saying he wants Trump jailed and felt that the Biden team’s attempt to make the election seasons about Jan 6 would backfire with people more worried about food and housing.
De Niro’s long list of Trump-related complaints
In fact, De Niro has gone on record to say that despite his history of playing gangsters and other villains, he would never ever play Donald Trump and that there was nothing “redeemable” about him. But all this makes one wonder, why does Donald Trump bring out Robert De Niro’s inner Travis Bickle?
Even though most of Hollywood are avowed liberals, De Niro’s belligerence against Trump is a shade hotter than usual. Before the 2016 Elections, De Niro had claimed that Trump was “totally crazy” and wondered why people liked Trump.
In another video from 2017, he said: “He’s so blatantly stupid. He’s a punk. He’s a dog. He’s a pig. A con. A bullsh*t artist. A mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about” He even added that he wanted to “punch Trump in the face”.
However, when Trump became President, De Niro hoped that he would do the “right thing”.
However, by 2017 he was convinced that Trump was horrible and said: “The administration’s mean-spiritedness towards our art and entertainment is an expression of their mean-spirited attitude about people who want that art and entertainment, people who also want and deserve decent wages, a fair tax system, a safe environment, education for their children and healthcare for all.”
Later in 2017, in a Brown University commencement speech, De Niro told students they were graduating into “tragic, dumbass comedy” and asked students lock themselves into the university.
At the Tony Awards in 2018, he said: “F*** Trump.” This led to a rebuttal by Trump who called De Niro a “very LOW IQ individual” who was “punch drunk” by receiving two many shots “to the head by real boxers in movies”.
In 2017, while speaking to The Guardian, De Niro called Trump a “real racist” and compared him various fascists: “If he had his way, we’d wind up in a very bad state in this country. I mean, the way I understand it, they laughed at Hitler. They all look funny. Hitler looked funny, Mussolini looked funny and other dictators and despots look funny.”
Later he claimed that Trump was worse than mob folks saying: “I mean, a mob boss calls people ‘a rat’. That means you lied and somebody snitched on you, so you did commit the crime. So that’s interesting, and he makes mobsters look bad because there are mobsters who will shake your hand and keep their word. He can’t even do that.”
On the Stephen Colbert Show, he said: “Even gangsters have morals, and they have ethics. They have a code, and you know when you give somebody your word, it’s your word, because it’s all you have is your word. This guy, he doesn’t even know what that means.”
In fact, for a long time, one of De Niro's most iconic scenes was him as Travis Bickle asking an empty mirror while pointing a gun at it: "You talkin' to me?" It would appear that as far as De Niro in his 80s is concerned, it's always Trump talking to him.
