Dear Mr. De Niro,
I trust you had a wonderful evening at the Oscars. Watching you bask in the comforting embrace of the special people was a reminder of who you really are—a movie star.
By the looks of it, the Oscars are back. They have a host now and they gave their top prize to a movie people actually saw. It won a whopping 7 Oscars. There were dance numbers and jokes, beautiful people in their finery—a grand celebration to revive the lifeless body of Hollywood.
I was shocked that they kept politics mostly out of it—well, until near the end when Jimmy Kimmel just had to bring in Trump—not just to mock him but to show the country which side all of you are on and to let them know, in no uncertain terms, that they are not invited to this party.
Turns out, Trump really did write that:
But might I say, Mr. De Niro, none of you seem able to figure out if Trump is such a criminal/fascist/dictator/rapist/racist, why he’s kicking Biden’s ass in the polls six ways from Sunday? Funny, isn’t it, Mr. De Niro? Didn’t Bill Maher ask you this same question on Real Time? You didn’t have an answer except to say that Trump is a “monster,” a “mean, nasty, and hateful person.”
And that if “We want to live in a world that we want to live and enjoy living in, or live in a nightmare. Vote for Trump, and you'll get the nightmare.”
Let me get this straight. You said that you would never play Trump because there is “Nothing redeemable in him.”
So, Max Cady in Cape Fear, Al Capone in The Untouchables, and William Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon had redeemable traits? They were all mass murderers, Mr. De Niro, yet you not only delighted in playing those roles but also earned Oscar nominations for two of them. And I’m betting a nice fat paycheck at the end of the day.
Al Capone was connected to hundreds of murders, William Hale committed a near-genocide of the Osage people, and Max Cady, well, need we be reminded?
Trump is not nice to you, Mr. De Niro. That is true. He isn’t very nice to Hollywood or Jimmy Kimmel, or to the establishment. But did it ever occur to you that so many people love him because he isn’t one of you? And that your crazy ramblings about him only make his supporters love him even more?
You, like Hollywood, like the Democrats, like Bill Maher, have become so disconnected from the lives of Americans that you can’t possibly understand why Trump is by far preferable. You seem to think you have the right to tell them what they should want, what they should care about, and that your own personal happiness should be a factor they consider.
Have you driven through any of our cities lately? Have you driven down to the border? Have you gone to a grocery store? Have you gone into Walmart only to see everything locked up, from baby formula to batteries to deodorant? Have you driven across America to see what this country is really like?
I’m guessing not. Why would you? You go from the film set to your multi-million dollar property, and you turn on MSNBC and CNN and you RAGE RAGE against the man they keep telling you is a dictator and fascist who will never leave office, take Bill Maher off the air, and then hunt you down like you’re Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor.
Trump is the one being hunted. He was thrown off Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. They took Parler offline and buried the Hunter Biden laptop. Everything you say Trump will do, Biden is already doing.
That you think Trump cares about you enough to bother jailing you is laughable. Trump had every opportunity to lock up journalists like the Democrats are doing now, to arrest protesters, like the Democrats are doing now, and to indict Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. But guess what? He didn’t.
Your lack of self-awareness is on par with your brilliant performance in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. Remember that guy? Rupert Pupkin. He was completely disconnected from reality too, and lived in a fantasy world of his own making, but that fantasy eventually drove him to kidnap Jerry Langford for a spot on the show. It was edgy and, at the time, made people worried that you were sending a dangerous message to audiences.
And remember Travis Bickle? He, too, was disconnected from reality. Eventually, his delusions of grandeur transformed him into a vigilante who would try to assassinate a politician and eventually save a child prostitute from the bad guys, devolving into a murderous blood bath.
You seem to see yourself as a little of Travis and a little of Rupert, hoping to stop a madman somehow but also consumed by a fantasy that invents a version of Trump that doesn’t exist. You are chasing phantoms, Mr. De Niro.
And it all started back in October of 2016.
That’s quite a magic trick, huh? I mean, there you were telling us what a terrible person Trump was and that you’d like to punch him in the mouth, and yet, here we are, almost a decade later, and you’re still saying the same thing as though Joe Biden never took office in 2021 and the problems we’re all facing now should still be Trump’s fault?
Your ignorance and delusions are not important, Mr. De Niro, with due respect. Trump and his supporters are fighting for the country they want. They’re not even thinking about you.
Joe Biden and the Democrats had four years to prove to Americans that they were better and that we should all be happy now that they’re in power. But that isn’t what they did. They focused almost all of their time and energy on perpetuating the ongoing crisis that is Trump and MAGA.
All you seem to care about is clinging to power. You don’t seem to care about the reality of what it’s like to live in this country as a working-class American.
Here is Batya Ungar-Sargon:
Your life as a wealthy movie star is in stark contrast with the realities of most Americans, especially those who voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and will again in 2024. Do you think they matter at all? Is it just about your own personal happiness? What would Travis Bickle say?
What do you know about anything, Mr De Niro, except being a great actor and attending awards shows? That doesn’t give you the right to bark at desperate Americans who have no representation in government. They are mocked for even daring to fight for the country they want - mocked on Saturday Night Live, mocked on Bill Maher, mocked at the Oscars.
But you all embarrass yourselves because after all of that you’ve thrown at Trump, an eight-year odyssey to bring down your nemesis, what do you have to show for it except a failing president with a disastrous approval rating and a political party that is hemorrhaging Black, Hispanic and female voters.
An Empire in Collapse
Right about now, you all have become like Bernie Madoff, one of the people you seem to think was “admirable” enough to play. The establishment has its own Ponzi scheme going, trying to pull a fast one on the public and hoping we don’t notice. Trump is a threat to their power but sooner or later, the whole thing is coming down, Mr. De Niro, just like in The Wizard of Lies.
It is not a matter of if but when. If it’s not Trump, it will be someone else because that is the fight now. The fight is between the ruling class and the people they’ve abandoned.
You pay a price for existing in such an insular feedback loop, Mr. De Niro. You don’t hear any news from the outside world. It’s kept from you. You’d have to be curious enough to go looking for it. You probably don’t even know why Biden’s poll numbers crashed and never recovered.
That’s because the media you watch and read, the pillars of journalism that you trust, and that I trusted once too, before 2020, didn’t tell you about the botched exit from Afghanistan. You were kept completely in the dark as they all pretended it went fine, but 13 American soldiers died. It destabilized the global order, and it woke Americans up to the incompetent man in the White House.
Biden’s mismanagement of such a crucial military operation exposed his weakness as the leader of the free world. Xi Jinping saw. Hamas saw. Vladimir Putin saw. And now look, we’re on the brink of World War III, all because people like you didn’t like Donald Trump and demanded he be removed from power.
The mighty United States is suddenly fragile in the eyes of the world and vulnerable at the hands of not just a weak president but an entire propaganda media that is gaslighting us and insisting the Emperor is wearing beautiful new clothes.
Those approval numbers never recovered because Biden can’t un-old himself, and he doesn’t trust Kamala Harris to take over. Now we know that was all a big lie, too - she was just window-dressing to make Biden look good. Are you starting to see the Ponzi Scheme now? How it was one deception piled on top of another?
The only play for Team Biden after Afghanistan was to shift blame to Trump and MAGA, which they did heading into the 2022 midterms. Why do you think the indictments came after that? Why do you think they were coordinated? Don’t you think if everyone trusted Biden to pull off a win, they wouldn’t have to resort to such desperate measures?
Every Big Brother needs a Goldstein, as in 1984, and just like that, the Democrats have theirs in Trump. A forever crisis to keep the public compliant and afraid. As long as they keep the hate machine whirred up, the people will never look at them, only at the source of their ending rage.
Don’t you see what you’ve become, Mr. De Niro? Don’t you see what side you’re really on? Don’t you see that no one in the real world sees your Trump Derangement Syndrome as anything other than the ramblings of a man who is out of touch and out of time?
Trump is still polling ahead after everything they’ve thrown at him, after all of the phony charges and mass hysteria witch hunts, all to shut up a guy whose biggest crime is having a big mouth, because what the Democrats have offered us is 1984, a utopia that became a totalitarian dystopia:
The Ministry of Truth - the media, the culture, Hollywood, institutions.
The Ministry of Peace - fighting wars.
The Ministry of Love - the justice system.
The Ministry of Plenty - Our economy.
Orwell left us a trail of breadcrumbs back to sanity from what utopias can do to otherwise free societies:
And so it has.
So, if you are still wondering why so many people still support Trump, I have the answer for you. All you have to do is look in the mirror. Take a good, long look. Your credibility is shot, Mr. De Niro. Your warnings were nothing but fear-mongering at great cost to all of us.
Why would you expect anyone to listen to you at all, let alone believe you? They will say, Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
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Respectfully, Mr. De Niro, Get a Grip