Robert De Niro: 'Trump is a real racist, a white supremacist'
The notoriously reticent star has become one of the most vocal critics of Donald Trump. He talks about how the man in the White House makes mobsters look bad, the damage being done to America – and how he fears for his mixed-race children
Here, with Orson Welles and Spike Lee on the walls, and James Dean and Natalie Wood on the doors to the toilets, is where Robert De Niro might have died. In October, a pipe bomb addressed to the actor was sent to the New York warehouse where his film production company hugs an atrium dotted with vintage movie posters.
A security guard found the suspicious package in the mailroom at 5am and police vehicles swarmed the Tribeca neighbourhood before dawn. De Niro got a call from security early that morning telling him the pipe bomb was being removed. “Naturally you are concerned,” he says phlegmatically. “It’s just what it is. Just be careful.”
Cesar Sayoc, a bodybuilder, pizza deliveryman and fanatical supporter of Donald Trump, was subsequently arrested in Florida and charged with sending a total of 13 pipe bombs to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other critics of the president. De Niro says only: “There are a lot of crazy people out there. Everybody’s got their reasons.”
How did the double Oscar-winner find himself on a hit list alongside Obama and Clinton? The short answer is that De Niro has become one of the most colourful, pugnacious and unsubtle decriers of the Trump presidency.
The late politicisation of De Niro is all the more remarkable because of his reputation as a man of few words, notorious for responding to journalists’ questions with terse monosyllables. He stormed out of interviews with the BBC’s Barry Norman – who rashly gave chase – and with the Radio Times, claiming he was being asked questions with a “negative inference”. The New York Times mused in 1993: “No one, perhaps, is better suited to being an actor and less suited to being a personality.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/06/robert-de-niro-trump-is-a-real-racist-a-white-supremacist
