Academy Award-winning actor Robert De Niro blasted former President Donald Trump as a “total monster” during an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday.
“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,” De Niro said.
The actor, noting that the November election will likely be a rematch of Trump versus Biden, argued that a repeat Trump presidency would be a “nightmare,” while a vote for Biden would return America “to normalcy.”
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“I just don’t want to feel the way I did. And many of us don’t,” he said, referring to Trump’s surprise victory in 2016.
“It can’t be. It cannot be,” De Niro continued. “If he wins the election, you won’t be on this show anymore. He’ll come looking for me. [There will] be things that happen that none of us can imagine. That’s what happens in that kind of a dictatorship, which is what he says [he wants]. Let’s believe him. Take him at his word.”
De Niro said he had trouble empathizing with Trump’s supporters, though he speculated that they have backed the candidate because of his message of outrage. “They want to fuck with people, screw them, because they’re unhappy about something,” he said.
Trump, he declared to an extended round of applause, is “a sociopathic, psychopathic, malignant narcissist,” adding, “He is a dangerous person… [People] somehow think he’s going to be the answer to their prayers, whatever those are, God knows.”
De Niro said he didn’t know Trump during his years as a real estate tycoon in New York, and that he never desired to. “He was an idiot,” he said. “He was a clown.”
Concluding his diatribe, the actor blasted Trump as a classic schoolyard bully supported by a posse of servile yes-men.
“People decide whether they want to oppose him, or they want to let him just tell them what to do and own the schoolyard or the basketball court or whatever it is,” he said. “He’s got to be stopped.”
