Robert De Niro has a serious case of Trump envy

The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be “the end of the world”) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: “Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for” – or as I wrote here: “How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an actual repelling effect?”

We get more set in our ways as we get older, though, so it’s unlikely that 82-year-old Robert De Niro will see the light and stop making a fool of himself over politics in general – and the Potus in particular – any time soon. He’s directed judgments such as “evil” and statements like “I can’t wait to see him in jail” at Donald Trump for more than a decade now; also deranged declamations such as: “He has no empathy. I don’t know where or what he is, but he’s an alien. It’s something deeply psychological in him, he wants to hurt people. He wants to hurt this country.” Not just the country but New York City specifically, for some reason: even though he grew up there, apparently enjoyed a swinging single life there and has lots of property there, “Donald Trump wants to destroy not only the city, but the country and eventually he could destroy the world.”

As far as De Niro is concerned, no plans are too sinister to ascribe to Trump, who’s just three years his junior at 79. “We cannot let up on him because he is not going to leave the White House… we’ve had two and a half centuries of democracy… we fought in two world wars to preserve it. Now we have a would-be king who wants to take it away. King Donald the First. Fuck that. We’re rising up again… we’re all in this together, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

This almost parasexual-seeming obsession goes back a long way, hilariously even to the 2016 incident during which De Niro said he wanted to “punch” the Republican presidential nominee “in the face”– in what was supposed to be a nonpartisan video encouraging people to vote. The excitable mummer added as an afterthought: “He’s a punk. He’s a dog. He’s a pig. He’s a con, a bullshit artist, a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t care, doesn’t pay his taxes. He’s an idiot.” Come on, Bob, tell us what you really think!

But is there more to this than the standard Trump Derangement Syndrome that the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell have displayed? Recent developments – in Manchester, England, of all the unlikely flash-points for this very American stand-off – might intriguingly suggest that it stems just as much from the envy of one mega-rich property developer for an even more successful one as it does from politics. De Niro’s business interests (while still holding on to the idea of himself as some sort of integrity laden “artiste”) are extraordinary, even in a profession in which Johnny Depp could spend $2 million a month – much of it on wine and yachts – and still portray himself as a rebel outsider.

De Niro is thought to be worth around $500 million; with properties around Manhattan, he also has a 78-acre estate in Gardiner, New York, which serves as his primary residence. Since 1990, he has owned or co-owned the Tribeca Grill restaurant (which closed this year) and the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca, and has business interests in around 50 Nobu restaurants and 19 Nobu hotels. He is a stakeholder in Paradise Found Nobu Resort, a company building a hyper-luxury $250 million destination on the island of Barbuda, due to be completed next year. And now we in England are privileged to have him bless our own excellent city of Manchester with his benevolence.

Last week De Niro took a whistlestop tour to this splendid northern powerhouse to promote the launch of the “Nobu Tower,” a 76-story edifice which aims to be the highest in the UK outside of London, comprising a 160-bedroom Nobu hotel, Nobu restaurant and 452 extremely expensive apartments. Looking somewhat baffled – was this Manchester, New Hampshire, Manchester, Maryland or Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts? – he admitted that he “did not know much” about this rainier Manchester but has seen enough from his smoked glass car window to sense the “real character and creative passion” there. Furthermore, he claimed to be “proud to be part” of the “creative, passionate and strong” city and promised recklessly: “I look forward to coming back when it’s finished, if not before. I plan to be around… I think it will take six years so I will make sure I am around.” So far, so insultingly clichéd. But it was when he spoke the following words that he sounded very much like a certain other builder of fancy towers: “I haven’t seen the city yet but I’d like to come back. Everyone is very nice, we’re having a very nice time.”

It could be Trump talking. Which got me thinking of the other similarities between them. De Niro has been married only twice to Trump’s thrice, but has seven children to Trump’s five, the latest of which he became a proud daddy to at a whopping 79, with his girlfriend Tiffany Chen being some 35 years younger than him. (The much-trumpeted difference between Trump and Melania is 24 years.) De Niro’s attitude to women can be somewhat less than respectful, as seen a few years back when his company had to pay more than a million dollars to his former assistant after a nasty court case over claims of “gender discrimination and retaliation.”

In an amusing echo of the time he came out with a string of anti-Trump abuse while simply urging people to vote: “In two days on the witness stand, De Niro conceded he had occasionally berated her and raised his voice in her presence, but said that he ‘was never abusive, ever’. But in a dramatic outburst, he looked directly at her and shouted ‘Shame on you!’ across the courtroom.” When it comes to over-indulged man-babies with minimal self-control, De Niro totally outdoes Trump.

In his strange obsession with Trump, and in De Niro’s own turbocharged greed (most of us agree that those who mistreat waiting staff are the lowest of the low; in 2009 Nobu paid $2.5 million to hundreds of workers who brought a court case claiming that their tips had been pilfered by management), we see a prime example of a man for whom chasing the almighty dollar has become far more of an obsession for him than it is for his nemesis. It is what they have in common that makes the actor hate the politician so and which has led to the hysterical “othering”: “He has littered our city with monuments to his ego,” said De Niro, now preparing to leave an indelible mark on beautiful Manchester, a city he had never seen. 

It’s ironic that the supposedly righteous fury of the Hollywood Red Brigade is far more the envy of the multimillionaire for the billionaire than any sort of desire for social justice on behalf of the poor, who they pretty much view as irretrievable Deplorables. It’s amusing that the richest and most privileged public figures of our time are those most subject to the politics of envy – and in De Niro’s attacks on Trump, we see this in its most heightened and hilarious form.