Robert De Niro says President Biden should “keep up the fight” against former President Trump, advising the commander in chief to “go at him hard.”
“Keep at him,” De Niro said when asked by Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour” on Thursday about his message to Biden on a strategy towards Trump.
“Go at him hard. And every chance you get, go at him,” he said.
“Go at him, because people, they take notice of that stuff,” the 80-year-old “Godfather” actor said.
“He’s not afraid,” De Niro said of Biden, adding the president is “doing what he should do.”
Asked if Biden was “the right guy” to take on Trump, De Niro responded, “We don’t have a choice, and I think he is the right guy. He’s a good guy. He’s trying to do the right thing.”
“We don’t have a choice,” the Academy Award winner repeated. “And I say that in a very positive, good way.”
De Niro has been one of Trump’s fiercest Hollywood critics. In 2018, he famously denounced the then-president onstage at the Tony Awards, declaring “F— Trump.” He’s said before that he wanted to “punch [Trump] in the face” and has called him a “flat-out blatant racist” and “a f—ing idiot.”
Trump has also hit back at the performer over the years, slamming De Niro as a “very low IQ individual.”
But while dubbing Trump a “genuinely sick person that somehow has been allowed into our system,” De Niro told Ruhle, “I’m tired of calling him names.”
“He just can’t be anywhere near the office of the presidency,” he said.
Likening Trump’s political ascent to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1930s Germany, De Niro said, “We always hear about people from Eastern Europe, the Jews from other parts of Eastern Europe, from Western Europe coming over.”
“When I was a kid, they’d say, ‘You don’t really appreciate this country. You don’t really appreciate what we know from experience.’… I’m just starting to see it. As a kid, I said, ah, Hitler, it’s a nightmare. That never would happen. But now I see that it’s possible.”
Saying that democracy is at risk if Trump wins reelection in November, De Niro warned, “The guy’s a monster. He is beyond wrong. It’s almost like he wants to do the most horrible things that he can think of in order to get a rise out of us.”
“I don’t know what it is,” De Niro said, “but he’s been doing it and doing it, and it’s f—ing scary.”
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