De Niro’s gangster ethos

Robert De Niro has made it clear he’s no fan of President Trump, said Michael Schulman in The New Yorker. Over the past two years, De Niro—famously a man of few words—has called the commander in chief a “punk,” “pig,” “bozo,” “idiot,” “national disaster,” and more. Those public condemnations explain why the 75-year-old actor was one of the 13 prominent Trump critics and Democrats sent pipe bombs last year by a militant supporter of the president. De Niro wasn’t surprised to get a bomb in the mail. “The state of the country is so terrible now, with a person who has set such a bad example of bad behavior,” he says. “So what are you gonna do?” De Niro despairs that many Americans see Trump as a role model for assertive, unapologetic masculinity. “It’s through some deep insecurity that he actually behaves the way he does.” To be a true man, he says, “you gotta be sensitive. You gotta have empathy.” He believes that Trump, a fellow New Yorker, wants to be like the gangsters and tough guys De Niro has played on screen. But Trump “even gives gangsters a bad name, ’cause a gangster will give you his word. He doesn’t even understand that kind of logic. He thinks he’s a mobster. He’s a mutt.”