Robert De Niro is dreadfully worried that, should President Donald Trump evade impeachment and be re-elected, he’ll likely start a war in a brazen effort to secure a third term.
“I’m worried because if he gets re-elected, it’s gonna be very, very bad—very bad on a lot of levels. We already have a lot of reparations, if you will—repairs—to do to the damage that he’s already done, and he has to be gotten out,” De Niro tells The Daily Beast. “He’s going to be history at one point, though he’d love to be president for life. He jokes about it. I think that if he became president for a second term he’d try to have a third term, and let smarter people manipulate it into getting us into some kind of altercation: a war.”
According to the star of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, the upcoming Netflix film The Irishman, and really too many classic films to mention, this theory was first floated to him by longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese.
“The only other president who served a third term was Roosevelt because he was in a war, and this fool would go and start something. This was what Marty Scorsese was saying, and I said, ‘Marty, I never thought of that. I never thought he’d go for a third term if there was a war or something,’” De Niro explains. “Trump joked about being ‘president for life’ with [Chinese president Xi Jinping] and so-on, he’ll pardon anybody, he’ll do anything. The day after he was elected, I went on a TV show and said I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and say that I hope he won’t be as bad as I think he will be, but he’s turned out to be a lot worse.”
De Niro’s been without question Trump’s most outspoken critic in Hollywood, saying he’d like to “punch him in the face” during the former reality TV host’s campaign, proclaiming “Fuck Trump!” at the Tonys, and calling him “crazy” during a recent CNN appearance. He’s also reserved some of his ire for the toadying Trumpkins at Fox News, the network which has largely acted as an arm of the Trump administration, and told CNN’s Brian Stelter: “Fuck ’em.”
“I’m not really political but I saw when [Trump] would go to those rallies and he’d say, ‘I want to get this person and punch him in the face,’ and I’d think, how dare this person have this kind of a rally? How dare you do that!” the acting legend exclaims. “And I think about [Rupert] Murdoch, and what he did to this country. He’s an immigrant who became a citizen, and look what he contributed? Look what this guy did? It’s disgraceful—beyond disgraceful, beyond cynical. Fox News, it’s all about money and power. At what cost? And you’re not even an American. You’re someone who wanted to be an American, and this is what you gave us?”
“I’m just so incensed by this guy,” De Niro adds of Trump. “He’s conning people every day. It’s a blight on our country. We have a lot of making-up to do to earn back people’s trust, and to get back on track where certain allies will trust us enough to know that we won’t allow an idiot to get in office again.”
Our full interview with Robert De Niro—on everything from reuniting with Scorsese and Pesci on The Irishman to who Dems should back in 2020 to take down Trump—will run this weekend.
