De Niro skewers Trump speech at State of the Swamp

Robert De Niro sat quietly in a corner. Just 15 feet away, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was on stage speaking. “You can have democracy or you can have wealth in the hands of a concentrated few. But you can’t have both,” Johnson said at Washington’s National Press Club on Tuesday night. The audience of 500 had assembled for the State of the Swamp, an event created to serve as counter-programming for Donald Trump’s State of the Union.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey had just finished speaking about how concentrated wealth destroys democracy. “Unity isn’t uniformity,” he explained. “We are a country of great debates and disagreements.”

De Niro absorbed it all. While the mayors spoke, Trump was several blocks away at the Capitol in the middle of a boring diatribe that ran nearly two hours. 

No one summed up the president’s speech better than CQ/Roll Call’s John Bennett. “What he did not do was ask the House and Senate to pass any new authorizations for him to use U.S. military force against Iran or to achieve his polarizing Western Hemisphere policy goals,” Bennett wrote. “In fact, the president spent just a few minutes on foreign policy, spending most of the address telling Americans who have grown frustrated with his economic and domestic policies that they are working — despite his declining poll numbers.”

The differences in tone and substance between the president’s address and the speeches at the Press Club from the likes of former Homeland Security official-turned-Trump-critic Miles Taylor, lawyer and New York congressional candidate George Conway, voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams, actor Mark Ruffalo and others, were glaring.

De Niro has used his celebrity to criticize Trump, much as Bruce Springsteen, Mark Hamill and other artists have done. But I remained curious as to what drives an 83-year-old man who has won Academy Awards and is celebrated across the globe to show up at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night to speak to a bunch of people celebrating dissent by wearing frog hats? 

Okay, I was also there to speak to the crowd about the First Amendment. But I’m about 20 years younger than De Niro, and I don’t have an Oscar. Still, there he was, as comfortable among politicians, reporters and activists as if he were sitting at home having coffee.

“Why do you do this?” I asked. 

He smiled. “Sometimes I am ashamed. I go overseas and they ask about Trump. And I tell them imagine if the stupidest moron in your country were running your country, how would you feel?”

I understood his concern and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a chuckle. 

“I feel betrayed by my country,” he explained in language similar to what he would use on stage a short time later. “I am heartbroken.”

I told him that I try to remain hopeful. He nodded. “But I’ve been betrayed by hope before. But I understand what you’re saying. You have to have some hope. I’m just careful what I hope for.”

I fully understood that sentiment. Hope is conditional and limited in a country run by “dishonest, greedy and cruel authoritarians,” as De Niro described Trump and his kind. The actor spoke for about 10 minutes, and although he is four years older than the president, he said more in that time than Trump said in nearly two hours — and De Niro said it passionately. More importantly, it made sense.

Our government has failed us, he said. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does need to return to the values that gave us our strength and humanity… If you want our leaders to be accountable, if you’re devoted to the Constitution and the rule of law, if you want the United States of America to be worthy of your love, be ready to take to the streets together and we will take our country back.”

Predictably, De Niro’s words struck a nerve with Trump. On Thursday the president took to Truth Social and threatened to “put him on boat” and deport him. De Niro, he wrote, was “another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying — some of which is seriously CRIMINAL!”

Trump is probably more angry his own speech was so lackluster that even his closest followers weren’t impressed. They admitted to me before and after his record-breaking address that it was simply his standard stump speech mixed in with Truth Social posts, stray comments made on Air Force One and in other gaggles, and that it relied heavily on insults and insinuation.

“He’s not the same guy he was in the first administration,” Stephanie Grisham, who served as press secretary during Trump’s first term, told me. She too was a speaker at the event. I followed her on stage — which was a bit amusing and perhaps ironic, as I had named her in my 2019 lawsuit against Trump to get back my White House press pass after it was revoked by the administration.  

To Grisham’s credit, she will probably go down in history as the smartest, most politically astute press secretary of either Trump administration. While many, including myself, gave her grief for never giving a single press briefing during her one-year tenure, she also never took the stage in the Brady Briefing Room and vomited lies to us. She smiled as I mentioned that, but she also said that was one thing she would never do.

The endless amount of analysis that came in the wake of Trump’s speech doesn’t adequately describe the divisiveness of his presence, and much of it was driven by his complete ignorance of facts. Some of his own supporters wish he’d quit talking about the 2020 presidential election. “If the Democrats cheated, then how did so many Republicans get elected? People know we’re not telling the truth,” a Trump insider confessed. “But he loves to make that point.”

Trump also brought up the killing of Iryna Zarutska on a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, and blamed it on a dangerous “illegal immigrant” — even though the suspect was an American citizen, and was born and raised in the United States. Time and again, Trump shows that facts do not matter to him.

Analyzing the policy in Trump’s speech is pointless. There was none. Describing the blowback is irrelevant. Some of the Democrats walked out. Some yelled. Only four members of the Supreme Court showed up, and the president insulted the entire institution. It was all as planned, representing everything we’ve seen out of Trump. Ultimately, it shows us something that we as a nation had better come to grips with sooner rather than later. 

“I grew up after World War II,” De Niro said. “I thought we defeated all of this. I thought we knew better. I’m worried not about the State of the Union now, but the State of the Union in November when we vote.”

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The midterm elections are where many, including De Niro, place their greatest hope. And they are where Grisham says we should have our greatest concern. Both are right for the same reason: The midterms will determine the future course of a divided, misinformed and malignant country.

Trump’s State of the Union was the starter pistol, providing the ammunition his MAGA followers will use to try to ensure there remains a Republican majority in the House and Senate. As a feckless Trump follower explained to me, “It isn’t just Trump any more. It is [JD]Vance, [Marco] Rubio, [Mike] Johnson, [John] Thune, [Scott] Bessent, [Doug] Burgum, [Steve] Witkoff, [Stephen] Miller, [Sebastian] Gorka and many more. The Democrats don’t have a leader right now. People gravitate to strength. Iran will fall and then Cuba.” 

But the inept followers aside — and many of them are falling to the side — there are those who see the handwriting on the wall. “Donald Trump came out of the gate blazing,” a former administration staffer told me. “But he’s got nothing left in the tank. The State of the Union was a bust. No new ideas. It looked like a game show as he brought in people. It sounded dull and boring and it was.”

For many in the GOP, Trump’s supporters are quickly becoming a minority, and that’s what has many worried. “What will Donald Trump do to remain in power?” is a question both his followers and his detractors are asking. Will he resort to voter suppression? That’s a given. He’s telegraphed that. His ultimate desire is to scare people into staying home in November so Republicans can win. His despair is so deep, according to many of his closest congressional allies, that he’s already claiming the Democrats are cheaters eight months before the election. “He’s laying the groundwork much as he did before his 2020 loss,” I was told.

I remember that all too well. Six weeks before the election, I asked Trump if he would accept a peaceful transfer of power. He told me if you stop counting votes there wouldn’t be one. We know what to expect in the midterms.

Meanwhile, his erstwhile supporters like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz are doing their best to spin Trump’s State of the Union into the inspiration needed to win the vote in November. Cruz called it “masterful,” raving that “The President’s record of success contrasts with the Democrats’ anger and hate.”

Of course even some of Trump’s biggest supporters privately say they’re tired of his “anger and hate.”

Then there’s Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who tweeted, “Thanks to @POTUS, military recruitment is through the roof. Amazing what happens when you focus on supporting our boots-on-the-ground soldiers.” Or, you could say that it’s amazing what happens when you’re young and you can’t find a job unless you enlist in the military.

Finally there was Speaker Mike Johnson: “President Trump gave the longest State of the Union speech in history because he had so many wins to tout, so much good news to deliver, so much to remind the American people of — that we have kept the promises that we made in 2024,”he said during an interview on Fox News. “And the first year of the second term of President Trump was amazing and he put a lot of that on display tonight.”

Sure, it’s a bigger, brighter future on one hand, but it’s a dystopian hellscape on the other.

Drifting through both worlds on Tuesday night, it was difficult to see how we can reconcile our differences based on the extremes seen on both sides of the aisle — especially if you ignore the middle ground, where most of us dwell.

But the revelations and fallout from the Epstein files aren’t over. The midterms are eight months away, and De Niro’s invocation of hope has mass appeal for those who just want to secure the true blessings of liberty our founders embraced. “That’s where we have to concentrate our efforts,” De Niro said, echoing the thoughts of most Democratic strategists — and anyone who doesn’t bow in fealty to Trump.

The starter pistol has gone off. It’s clear that Trump has nothing new to offer, and while his followers try to weave a “Golden Age” myth out of whatever in the hell we’ve been through in the last year, they do have one thing right: Democratic leadership is unfocused and, in many cases, it still allows the Republicans to frame the political arguments. 

For the GOP to lose in November and fulfill the hopes of a majority of the country,  Democrats must blast their way through the robust Republican rhetoric telling us they cheat, that we should be afraid of immigrants — even if they aren’t immigrants — and only Donald Trump can make things better.

The polls, the economy and the Epstein files are aligning themselves this spring to derail Trump and reduce his lengthy State of the Union address to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

“Honestly, I’d bet within a few days no one is even quoting it,” one Republican member of Congress told me. “I forgot it right after I heard it.”