For a very long time, the actor Robert De Niro was reticent in interviews. He was solitary or shy or inarticulate – biographers couldn’t decide which. Then Donald Trump was made president, and public De Niro – the De Niro we read in magazines, who appeared at Hollywood events – became openly, angrily, exasperatedly chatty, at least on politics. Trump was a New Yorker, like De Niro, but not a good New Yorker, it turns out. He was a “fool”, a “bozo”, a “national disaster”. How could he have become president? Why weren’t more Americans embarrassed, or terrified? “Fuck Trump!” he shouted while appearing at an awards ceremony in 2018. It was an offhand remark that earned him an ovation. During an interview later that year he added, “I feel that more people should speak out against him, not be genteel about it.”
This is the De Niro I meet on Zoom, one afternoon a few months ago. Outspoken De Niro. Politically frustrated De Niro. He is bethroned in a hotel suite in Cannes, grey-haired and lined of face, present as an irked but not unpleasant grandpa. (He recently turned 80.) It is shortly before the actors’ strike and long before Trump’s appearance at a New York courthouse on charges of fraud. “I’m going to go into this,” De Niro says. “The political situation we’re in in my country, it is crazy and absurd – we lost control. I see the phenomenon of Trump, the phenomenon of people not standing up to him, people who ought to know better… They’re causing great concern in the country and a lot of anxiety. I feel like since he’s come on the scene – even after being president – it’s like when an abusive parent rules a household, only it’s not just one household it’s the whole country. We’re like, ‘What’s this guy going to do next? What’s he going to aggravate us about?’” The actor shrugs. “Is he just doing this to aggravate people? To make people unhappy? Maybe he is.”
