Sopan Deb of the New York Times, one of President Trump’s harsh critics in journalism, had this to say on Twitter after Robert De Niro’s obscenity-laced tirade against Trump at the Tony Awards last night:
AND TRUMP IS A HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITY. Whenever you write “Dear Hollywood” tweets defending Trump, you are also WRITING TO TRUMP.
— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) June 11, 2018
Trump is a Hollywood celebrity. It’s an observation that bears repeating. It also cuts more than one way.
We now have a thrice-married, avowedly adulterous president who through his social media life extols self-expression over propriety and good manners. He has no shame about his sins and proudly publicizes them, against his family, the students of Trump University, and whomever else you like. He wastes no opportunity to promote himself. He is outspoken about issues he doesn’t understand. He places loyalty over integrity. He avoids reasoned debate in favor of getting emotional reactions out of people. He even gloats in private, with men he barely knows, about how when you’re famous you can grab the crotch of women you don’t even know, and they’ll like it.
In short, Trump really is Hollywood’s president.
He is the product of a trashy popular culture that has, over the long decades, run roughshod over America’s traditional values and culture. We owe people like De Niro for helping create Trump. It’s no accident that Trump’s worst moment on tape was recorded while shooting “Access Hollywood” — he probably felt quite comfortable in that environment speaking as he did. As we have learned in recent months, he was just describing what Hollywood people do.
To be clear, Trump is not a Hollywood-scripted president. He is the furthest thing you could imagine from Josiah Bartlett or Dave Kovic. Look instead to Hollywood’s celebrity culture — to what that those writing and acting the scripts do behind the scenes when they’re not busy preaching to the rest of us about how to live.
Celebs who get angry about Trump may also not like his policies, and that’s perfectly fair. But I think they’re mostly terrified because they’ve seen their own monstrous image in the mirror.
Take De Niro, for example, who like Trump is a foul-mouthed hothead who spouts off about issues he doesn’t understand. Like Trump, he utterly lacks self-awareness. De Niro has recently praised the #MeToo moment and claimed he knew nothing about mogul Harvey Weinstein, whose predations were apparently on near-constant display at De Niro’s restaurant, the Tribeca Grill.
Speaking of which, I can find nothing in Lexis-Nexis from De Niro about his 1989 visit to Poland with his longtime personal friend, child rapist Roman Polanski. Maybe he’ll address that sometime.
Anyway, when De Niro shouts, “Fuck Trump,” you are witnessing Hollywood’s Trumpian lack of self-awareness. Or rather, I should say that you’re getting an insight into where Trump gets it, from the same people whose decadeslong push against the bounds of human decency made something like a Trump presidency possible.
[Also read: Robert De Niro apologizes to Canadians for Trump’s ‘idiotic behavior’]
