Robert DeNiro broke down in tears as he railed against Donald Trump in his latest salvo against the president.
The Raging Bull star, 82, joined MS Now’s Nicolle Wallace on the Monday edition of The Best People podcast. Talk quickly turned to the 79-year-old president, with whom DeNiro has endured a prickly relationship.
“I want my country back,” the actor said at one point, then calling for Trump to be “neutralized.”
“It has to be neutralized by the people, who say, ‘Wait a minute, our rights are being trampled on, and we have to stand up!’ Period.”
Things became emotional when Wallace asked, “You’re always about lifting up everybody around you. Why is that?”
DeNiro, often cast as a tough guy, immediately showed his more tender side, sobbing as he declared, “You have to lift people up. You have to bring them together. You can’t divide people, you can’t win that way. It’s a no-win situation.”
Steering his point towards Trump, he added, “And look what we have. Look who we have there. It’s almost like a destiny to have this thing there, destroying, attempting to destroy this country and maybe not even understanding why. So it’s up to us to protect the country that we love.”
Wallace asked, “This is the moment that it goes one way or the other. You think it’s going the other way?”
DeNiro, whose sobbing had abated slightly, said solemnly, “I don’t know. All I know is people have to resist, resist, resist.”
He added, “There’s no easy way. It’s not going to come to you easy. You know, there’s a time when you know in your own life and your own survival, you better do this. You better jump and run through the fire because if you don’t run through the fire, you’re not getting out. And that’s what we have to do.”
Also on Monday, the Academy Award-winning actor, producer and director dialled into The Weeknight to discuss Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday.
“We gotta get rid of this idiot,” he told the hosts, later declaring, “We’re in a state of lunacy.”
“We’re dealing with a clown who has brought the rest of the circus into the White House. This is insanity, and we’ve gotta straighten it all out.”
He concluded: “We will vanquish, we will get rid of this guy.”
DeNiro has made no secret of his feelings towards Trump over the years. In May, he issued a call to action for anyone disturbed by the Kennedy Center’s right-wing makeover byTrump, whom he called “America’s philistine president.”
While accepting the Palme d’Or lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival, the actor warned that artists and musicians are under threat.
“In my country, we are fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted, and that affects all of us,” De Niro said.
In September, DeNiro joined Jimmy Kimmel’s “comeback” show for a brutal parody of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and the MAGA attack on free speech.
In March 2024, he said the then-former president was a “total monster” during an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher.
“He’s such a mean, nasty, hateful person. I’d never play him as an actor, because I can’t see any good in him. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing redeemable in him,” DeNiro said.
The feeling appears to be mutual. Trump has called DeNiro “a very Low IQ individual” and a “total loser.”
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