At an awards ceremony honoring Al Pacino, boxer Evander Holyfield, and music producer Quincy Jones and others, Robert De Niro had a suggestion on how to improve things in the U.S:
Impeach and imprison Donald Trump.
Speaking to the audience at the American Icon Awards Sunday, he lauded the honorees as “people of great individual accomplishments who give us examples to look up to. They’ve earned our respect and admiration, and they deserve it,” The Hill reports.
“On the other hand, the individual who currently purports to lead America is not worthy of any tribute,” De Niro said to applause and jeers.
De Niro was not discouraged and added:
“Unless you think of his impeachment and imprisonment as a sort of tribute,” he said.
“Now that’s how you can make America great again.”
De Niro has frequently and memorably made his feelings on Trump known and he didn’t stint on this occasion either, Mediaite reports.
“You didn’t think you were going to get away without a ‘f*ck Trump’ moment, did you?” he asked the audience.
At last year’s Tony Awards, De Niro was in a really fiery mood and raged:
“I’m going to say this — f*ck Trump! It’s no longer ‘down with Trump,’ it’s ‘f*ck Trump!'”
And his memorable remarks were met with thunderous applause and a standing ovation. In fact, De Niro may well be Trump’s most vocal celebrity opponent. In an April appearance on CBS’ The Late Show, the Good Fellas star fired off “This guy has proven himself to be a total loser.”
That was also met with thunderous applause.
De Niro has also called Trump a “pig” and a “real racist,” and commented during the 2016 presidential election that he’d like to “punch” Trump in the face.
Pertaining to that last comment, I’m afraid he’d have to stand in line.
Last year, after his comment at the Tony Awards, Trump wrote one of his usual third-grade-level tweets, calling the Taxi Driver star “a very low-IQ individual.”
“Wake up punchy,” he tweeted.
Despite Trump’s comments, De Niro is introspective, and a man of few words, notes The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman. The noted actor was one of a number of Trump critics who received a pipe bomb last year, and he noted that Trump’s behavior encourages extremists to come out of the woodwork.
“I think on a subconscious or subliminal level, and many other levels it gives the okay to many other people who are maybe more on the verge of thinking or fantasizing, that he’s somehow given the O.K. to do that,” De Niro says. “I used to think ‘well maybe once he becomes President, he’ll maybe’ — he’s a New Yorker. Not that that means anything, in certain ways, but it does in others. I thought ‘maybe he’ll come around.’ But he’s been worse than I ever could think. ‘Cause he has no plan. He has no center whatsoever. He even gives gangsters a bad name.”
Even a gangster will try to stick to his word, De Niro noted.
“‘Cause a gangster will give you his word and will pride himself — or herself. He [Trump] doesn’t even understand that kind of logic. He thinks he’s slick and all that. There’s something wrong with him mentally.”
De Niro is not wrong. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest Trump is struggling with inner demons. But he’s inflicting them on the rest of us if he is.
Here’s “punchy” Robert De Niro in the videos below.
Featured image courtesy of the video above
