We all know Robert De Niro despises Donald Trump.  With a vengeance.

I was curious to know why.  So I googled “trump de niro” and got a lot of hits of quotes and video clips of De Niro spouting vitriol but very little in the way of reasoning.

Not surprisingly, I did find this: De Niro claims Trump is “racist.” But not just racist but “a real racist.”

Being a racist is a good reason to oppose someone politically. But what exactly, I wanted to know, had Trump said to deserve De Niro labelling him as such? Try as I might I didn’t find any instances or quotes from De Niro as to why he concluded that Trump is a real racist. 

I was left to speculate. Arguably, the instance of Trump as racist claim was The Squad incident. This is a reference to Trump’s now infamous tweet that read (in part): “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Of course, Trump also added that, once accomplished, they should come back to the U.S. and tell us how it’s done.  That part of the tweet, curiously, was omitted in most mainstream media accounts. 

Perhaps De Niro read accounts of Trump’s tweet and confused him with another world leader. It was the Dalai Lama who, unlike Trump, said that immigrants should not only be sent back to where they came from but should stay there.  A month earlier than Trump’s tweet, the Dalai Lama said that “Europe is for Europeans” and that if Europe’s refugee influx was not held in check then “the whole of Europe [will] eventually become Muslim country.” After the inevitable backlash, what did the Dalai Lama do?  Why, he doubled down and insisted they return to their own countries, stay there, and “rebuild” those countries.  Virtually the exact opposite of what Trump said.

I cannot say for sure whether the Squad/Tweet is responsible for De Niro’s conviction of Trump’s racism and maybe my research wasn’t complete and De Niro has given other reasons. But I couldn’t find them.  There’s only so many Google pages one can scroll through.

But I did find this gem from De Niro: “Even gangsters have morals, and they have ethics.  They have a code, and you know when you give somebody your word, it’s your word, because it’s all you have is your word. (Trump) doesn’t even know what that means.”

Yes, Mr. De Niro, words have meaning… and consequences.

Here is what Robert De Niro said regarding the Jewish People back in 1983: “(Jews have) ‘turned this world into garbage for 5,000 years.”

Pretty damning, eh?  On the face of it, there is not a soul on the face of the planet who would not conclude that De Niro was both an anti-Semite and, dare I say it, “a real racist.”

But that’s not the whole story.

The above quote attributed to De Niro is from the February 7, 1983 issue of People Magazine in a piece on Jerry Lewis and his role as Jerry Langford in The King of Comedy, the movie in which De Niro starred, playing the role of Rupert Pupkin. And, it turns out, the anti-Semitic epithet he hurled at Lewis was meant to pump up Lewis’s anger immediately prior to a scene in which Lewis’s character had to display rage at Pupkin for barging into Langford’s country home uninvited.

So, De Niro’s racist comments weren’t actually racist at all; they were some sort of method acting ruse to get Lewis in a state of mind conducive to creating great cinema.  But for half an hour -- or whatever time frame it took Lewis to realize De Niro’s racist words were only uttered for art’s sake -- Lewis genuinely felt he was at the receiving end of a Nazi-inspired tirade aimed at his Jewish heritage.  You know, “Nazi”-like, kind of like when De Niro compared Trump to “Hitler.”

Taken out of context, words can have devastating effects. I’ve tried to find De Niro’s reasoning for labelling Trump a racist and have yet to find them. I can only conclude that at least one of those reasons is the Squad/Tweet incident. After more than half a century of being in the public spotlight, De Niro more than anyone should understand how the media works, the risk of one’s words being taken out of context, and how Trump not only didn’t mean the “real racist” words ascribed to him but he didn’t actually say what was ascribed to him. Unless of course Mr. De Niro suffers from Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

Shall we label Robert De Niro a virulent anti-Semite?  Because if the same selective citation process experienced by Donald Trump during the Squad/Tweet incident is visited upon Robert De Niro, the answer is clear.

Image: David Shankbone via Wiki