Sunday night was the 72nd Tony Awards, the annual ceremony that’s supposed to celebrate the best of Broadway. But what’s being talked about more than any of the winners or nominees, co-hosts Josh Groban and Sara Bareilles, or even a moving performance from the Parkland students was the unhinged anti-Trump tirade made by Robert De Niro.
De Niro stepped on the stage to give a simple introduction to Bruce Springsteen’s Tony-nominated show, and immediately went off the rails.
“I’m gonna say one thing … F–k Trump,” De Niro declared with his fists in the air. “It’s no longer ‘Down with Trump,’ it’s ‘F–k Trump!'”
Not surprisingly, his remarks were welcomed with cheers and a standing ovation. Like most award shows, they’re attended by liberals who have had nothing but animosity towards Trump after he announced his candidacy in 2015. And they’ve made their hatred for him obvious at virtually every single award show ever since. These awards shows were no longer about the craft of creating such art, they’ve become about Trump.
De Niro himself has made several off-the-wall attacks against the president from calling him a “mutt” and the “jerkoff-in-chief” among other things to saying he’d like to “punch him in the face.” He even said he’s “beyond” seeing the point of view of Trump supporters. He has truly gone off the deep end. But sadly, that’s par for the course in Hollywood.
Just within the last several days alone, we had Bill Maher “hoping” for another recession because a crashing economy can hurt Trump’s reelection chances.
“Sorry if that hurts people,” Maher told his audience, “but it’s either root for a recession or you lose your democracy.”
We might have hit peak Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Maher has openly called for the financial pain and suffering millions of Americans would face if they were hit with another recession, simply because he believes that would prevent Trump from winning a second term. It’s easy for a rich millionaire to say who likely wasn’t much affected if at all by the 2008 recession, but many of his fans surely were.
That came roughly a week after “Full Frontal” host Samantha Bee trashed Ivanka Trump for posting a picture on her social media accounts of her and her infant son amid an emotional immigration debate, calling her a “feckless c–t.” Unlike Roseanne Barr, whose racist tweet got her show cancelled, Bee offered an apology that was hollow at best. But aside from temporarily losing a couple of sponsors, she didn’t face any consequences.
What’s so remarkable about De Niro, Maher, and Bee is that they seemed to have learned absolutely nothing from the 2016 election. Their overzealous animus for Trump had alienated his supporters, many of whom previously voted for President Obama in prior elections. Celebrities have overwhelmingly embraced utter contempt for anyone who doesn’t think like them. Whether you’re a conservative or a Trump voter, you’re seen as a bigot, a racist, a white supremacist, a Nazi, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a misogynist, or a “deplorable.”
De Niro arrived at the Tony Awards thinking he was doing a public service with his profanity-laced stunt and has some sort of moral high ground. He runs with a group of countless A-listers who knew the truth about Harvey Weinstein for decades and didn’t do anything about it. He worked with Weinstein on several films over the years. So spare us the sanctimonious lectures.
Outspoken liberals in Hollywood aren’t the only people who have failed to recognize their own errors in 2016. Democrats continue to push identity politics instead of advocating an agenda that unites all Americans. And the mainstream media allows their disdain for the president to taint its reporting on a constant basis.
What none of them took away from Trump’s shocking victory was how out-of-touch they all were with average Americans. Sure, De Niro screaming like a cranky old man may have played well in viewing parties in LA and New York, but folks in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania probably felt differently. The #Resistance’s nonstop preaching about how bad Trump was in 2016 had an opposite effect on his supporters. In fact, they inadvertently motivated his base, turning their vote into a giant middle finger to the establishment and the elites.
Until Hollywood, Democrats, and the media empathizes with Middle America instead of ostracize them, they might as well pave the way to Trump’s reelection.
