Getting into the room the place Robert De Niro was ready had been difficult. He was squirrelled away from prying eyes in a again workplace on the National Press Club in Washington at an occasion known as the “State of the Swamp”. It was going down similtaneously Donald Trump was delivering his State of the Union deal with a mile throughout Washington DC on Capitol Hill. State of the Swamp was pitched because the riposte: an evening of Democrats and erstwhile Republicans denouncing the president.
The billing was formatted like a line-up for a music competition: ROBERT DE NIRO * SEN RON WYDEN * MAYOR JACOB FREY * MARK RUFFALO * MEHDI HASAN * DON LEMON. It was a jamboree for liberals preventing Trump’s energy seize. Mayor Frey of Minneapolis had informed Ice they need to “get the fuck out of our city”. The former CNN host Don Lemon had been arrested for coming into a church with protesters in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Online Maga influencers now habitually name for the deportation of Hasan, the Anglo-American founding father of the pro-Palestinian media outlet Zeteo and a former New Statesman author. This was a solid record for a loud, rebellious “resistance” to Trump.
A extra sombre rally, with round 30 members of Congress, was occurring that evening down on the National Mall. It was a chilly night time and never many individuals turned up. The State of the Swamp occasion, in the meantime, was offered out. The Democratic Party’s activists are hankering for full-throated opposition to the Maga age.
When I arrived, individuals wearing massive, fan-powered frog costumes have been waddling across the lobby. One pink frog had “amphifa” – amphibian antifa, that’s – scrawled throughout their abdomen. The frog has develop into an emblem of anti-Trump protest after individuals in inflatable frog outfits turned up at Ice raids in Portland, reclaiming the alt-right’s Pepe the Frog as their very own. The ambiance was so self-consciously uncool, even with De Niro as its star, that it felt transgressive. It was like a miniature theme park for members of the Resistance. The New York Post known as it the “alt-farce”. I believe that was the purpose.
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These have been individuals who had checked out Trump and concluded that the one solution to beat him was to ape his exuberant and incendiary tone – to rage in opposition to the Trumpian institution in the identical method that Trump had as soon as raged in opposition to the liberal elite. Trump was their image within the attic, their uglifying mirror.
In the center of the room, a tall, skinny man was posing for a photograph with a medium pink dildo. He was carrying aviators, a pair of Crocs and a hat that learn “Deport Melania”. Such refrains have develop into widespread on the left in addition to the correct in America. (A couple of days after the election in 2024, I had gone to a protest held between the Treasury Building and Boston Consulting Group’s workplace, the place protesters have been holding placards that learn “Deport President Musk” and “Afrikaner Go Home”.) In one nook of the room, there have been two armchairs and sure copies of the Epstein information. A photoshoot was arrange for individuals to pose with them.
The auditorium subsequent door resembled a Trump rally in that it didn’t actually matter what was stated on stage as a result of the gang was there to emote in unison. They cried “Shame! Shame! Shame!” when an image of Trump’s legal professional basic, Pam Bondi, appeared on display screen. I imagined them shouting: “Lock her up!” The viewers comprised largely middle-aged girls. The frogs beside the stage held indicators that learn “Eff yes” and “Damn Straight”. A Congresswoman from Oregon proclaimed: “Joy is resistance!”
I went exterior to discover a cigarette. The streets have been empty, bar the police vans parked on the intersection. Dildo Man was chatting to 3 De Niro followers who have been hoping to catch a glimpse of their hero. They have been shivering within the chilly and requested me if he was up there.
“I know where De Niro is, but I can’t tell you,” one of many organisers informed me. So I ferreted my method by a number of corridors with pale lights and squeaky flooring and finally discovered his press handler who stated he may perhaps get me a pair minutes with the good man if I stood silently over there subsequent to that submitting cupboard beside the 2 safety guards who have been whispering about find out how to shield De Niro as soon as he acquired on stage.
I leaned in opposition to the submitting cupboard about ten ft away from the handler in a slender hallway, approaching him from time to time to ask whether or not De Niro had stated sure, just for him to shoo me away as if I have been a disobedient goat. “I’ll ask, I’ll ask,” was all he would say. I assumed De Niro was elsewhere on this warren of corridors. But after about ten minutes the handler waved me over and opened the very door he was standing proper subsequent to.
His frown informed me that he didn’t like that De Niro had agreed to the interview. He stated I used to be fortunate: the clincher was that I wished to ask De Niro about Manchester. He had been within the north-west of England in October, as he’s an investor in a restaurant in one of many metropolis’s many new skyscrapers. “I’ve heard that Manchester is a place that people are gravitating towards. I heard that,” De Niro informed me as soon as I acquired in, his gritty, New York accent filling the room. “The people were nice – we had a nice time.”
His face was lined in shadows. He was sitting beneath a dim gentle on this tiny again workplace with a plate of pineapple and grapes in entrance of him on the desk. He couldn’t resolve whether or not “totalitarianism” or “tyranny” was the correct phrase to explain Trump’s America. I had requested him what the US would seem like in ten years. He stated that every one predictions, together with his personal, are baloney. But he settled on the concept that Trump was the start of a narrative and never the top. “There will be another person – maybe it’ll be in 20 years, or 25 or 30, where we’ll be faced with the same situation: whether you call it totalitarianism or tyranny.”
At the beginning, he spoke quietly. I couldn’t see his face that clearly. But by the darkness he started to be extra animated. I requested him what his biggest worry was. Living in a totalitarian society, he replied. That’s as a result of “there’s no order, there’s no real structure, there’s no law, there’s no nothing. There’s nothing that anybody can respect,” he stated. He was warming to his theme. He began enunciating onerous. “You’re going to respect the mind of someone like Trump to call the shots on everything?”
He didn’t look frail behind his maroon-tinted glasses, however he did look extra delicate than when he was on the massive display screen. His 82 years had left him small in his smooth navy jacket, rumpled round his physique.
The two minutes I had been promised shortly became 4, eight, 12. The flack saved coming out and in of the workplace, pacing from side to side, tapping me on the shoulder to rush up. He didn’t like this. De Niro raised his hand when the flack tried to wrap issues up. He was curious concerning the state of affairs in Britain. His first intuition is to ask questions when he finds one thing fascinating or he hasn’t thought by his reply. He is humble on each topic however his prognosis for American democracy.
I stated resentment in Britain was shortly turning into rage however fortunately the British don’t have weapons. He picked at his pineapple. “But you don’t have guns because you’re civilised,” he stated. De Niro is thought to the world because the proto-incel who obsessively factors a gun at his personal reflection in a mirror in Taxi Driver. He appeared to hope that the America he helped depict in that movie would at all times stay a fiction.
One of one of the best methods to grasp an American’s politics is to ask why they assume Trump was elected. De Niro’s view is that the training system hasn’t taught youngsters concerning the risks of tyranny. I raised a number of the different elements that had given rise to Trump: financial inequality, fashionable angst, the financialisation of day-to-day life, and so on. He expanded by stating that he was born in 1943 through the Second World War. Growing up within the postwar period, there was a “feeling of optimism”. “We came from somewhere. We had the UN. There was a structure.” And then Trump, who, he famous, is just a few years youthful than himself, “comes along and he just doesn’t have a clue as to what that is”. He stated one thing about Trump’s “personality”, stopped and concluded: “I don’t… I don’t even know.”
They had spiralled up collectively from the identical metropolis – Trump from Queens, De Niro from Manhattan – to develop into icons of American masculinity. They have been two of probably the most well-known males on this planet and patriarchs on the head of sprawling households. But the artist who believed in a postwar America that was younger, respectable, self-starting, was watching his peer tear aside the nation he had spent his life portraying and honouring. They each wished to wrench totally different variations of America again from the previous. I may really feel his anger curdling on the thought that somebody as vulgar as Trump was wrecking what he noticed as America’s core.
“I guess you must have the equivalent in Great Britain, where you get the con artists and the evangelists, like Tammy Faye Bakker, and then you get them coming in and doing all their bullshit. Right? It’s the same thing. And we have it now on a grand scale with the president of the United States.”
It all appeared inexplicable to him, regardless that he has spent his life chronicling the kind of society that spawns avaricious mobsters who are sometimes paying homage to Trump. In one of many two movies De Niro has directed, The Good Shepherd (2006), Joe Pesci’s character lists what America’s minorities can cling to: the Irish have their homeland; the Jews, their custom; the Italians, their household and church. He then asks Matt Damon’s Waspy CIA agent: “What about you people, Mr Carlson, what do you have?” “The United States of America,” Damon replies. “The rest of you are just visiting.”
Or maybe the ache De Niro now feels is rooted in his familiarity with Trump’s character, the nemesis he hoped might be contained with artwork. But he’s much less considering understanding Trump than ending his reign – and he doesn’t see the 2 as related.
“He never should have even been allowed to become eligible to run to be president,” De Niro stated. “You think that there’d be a way to screen people.”
Isn’t this perspective a part of the explanation that folks voted for Trump?
“You’re right, but he’s not eligible because he’s just not qualified. Every citizen is allowed the right to run – blah, blah, blah. That’s all great, but you’d think that there’d be some kind of screening process that everybody has to go through.”
I advised that, maybe, this was what we name an election.
“Yes, of course, it’s the election, but I think there [should be] a screening process before that. People don’t really know. It’s called low-information voters, whatever. I do the same thing, but there are people doing it in a way that, sadly – it’s dangerous.”
His face lastly tightened, one eye extra closed than the opposite, his lip curling inwards, like one thing was twisting his pores and skin from the within. “We have to get this regime out of government. I don’t care what’s falling apart, this and that. There are people like me and many of us. We can’t allow this to happen. This is our country – we can’t allow it to happen.”
“Trump does not want to do the right thing,” he stated moments earlier than his handler chucked me out. “He wants to destroy. It’s like having a lunatic driving a fucking tank around the city. You don’t drive tanks in the city. You don’t – you’re not allowed to. You can’t do it. You can’t run around with a gun, shooting it up. That’s what he’s doing. We can’t have that in any kind of society. Period.”
My time was up. I left De Niro in that small workplace and walked again by these corridors to the auditorium with the screaming viewers and the individuals dressed as frogs, and waited for his speech.
I couldn’t spot the safety guards when Robert De Niro acquired up on stage. It was approaching 11pm and the gang was flagging. De Niro had been ready backstage for greater than two hours by this level, choosing at his pineapple within the gloom, ruminating on how his nation had betrayed him, hoping that one other speech may rebuild a misplaced America.
His remarks have been a lament for the kind of nation he remembered from his childhood. “We all love our country,” he informed the room, pausing. “I choke on that phrase… because our country isn’t so lovable right now.” There have been chirps of “Ribbit! Ribbit!” from someplace within the viewers.
“If you want the United States of America to be worthy of your love, be ready to take to the streets together,” he stated to a roar. “We will take our country back.”
Where have I heard that earlier than?
[Further reading: Ai Weiwei: “Maybe I’m still seeking trouble”]
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This article seems within the 25 Mar 2026 situation of the New Statesman, Easter Special
