![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/202613freddie.jpg\")
\n Illustration by Azra Hirji<\/p>\n
\n Illustration by Azra Hirji<\/p>\n
Getting into the room where Robert De Niro was waiting had been tricky. He was squirrelled away from prying eyes in a back office at the National Press Club in Washington at an event called the \u201cState of the Swamp\u201d. It was taking place at the same time as Donald Trump was delivering his State of the Union address a mile across Washington DC on Capitol Hill. State of the Swamp was pitched as the riposte: an evening of Democrats and erstwhile Republicans denouncing the president.<\/p>\n
The billing was formatted like a line-up for a music festival: ROBERT DE NIRO * SEN RON WYDEN * MAYOR JACOB FREY * MARK RUFFALO * MEHDI HASAN * DON LEMON. It was a jamboree for liberals fighting Trump\u2019s power grab. Mayor Frey of Minneapolis had told Ice they should \u201cget the fuck out of our city\u201d. The former CNN host Don Lemon had been arrested for entering a church with protesters in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Online Maga influencers now habitually call for the deportation of Hasan, the Anglo-American founder of the pro-Palestinian media outlet Zeteo and a former New Statesman writer. This was a cast list for a loud, rebellious \u201cresistance\u201d to Trump.<\/p>\n
A more sombre rally, with around 30 members of Congress, was happening that evening down on the National Mall. It was a cold night and not many people turned up. The State of the Swamp event, meanwhile, was sold out. The Democratic Party\u2019s activists are hankering for full-throated opposition to the Maga age.<\/p>\n
When I arrived, people dressed in large, fan-powered frog costumes were waddling around the foyer. One pink frog had \u201camphifa\u201d \u2013 amphibian antifa, that is \u2013 scrawled across their stomach. The frog has become a symbol of anti-Trump protest after people in inflatable frog outfits turned up at Ice raids in Portland, reclaiming the alt-right\u2019s Pepe the Frog as their own. The atmosphere was so self-consciously uncool, even with De Niro as its star, that it felt transgressive. It was like a miniature theme park for members of the Resistance. The New York Post called it the \u201calt-farce\u201d. I think that was the point.<\/p>\n
Subscribe to the New Statesman today and save 75% <\/p>\n These were people who had looked at Trump and concluded that the only way to beat him was to ape his exuberant and incendiary tone \u2013 to rage against the Trumpian establishment in the same way that Trump had once raged against the liberal elite. Trump was their picture in the attic, their uglifying mirror.<\/p>\n In the middle of the room, a tall, skinny man was posing for a photo with a medium pink dildo. He was wearing aviators, a pair of Crocs and a hat that read \u201cDeport Melania\u201d. Such refrains have become common on the left as well as the right in America. (A few days after the election in 2024, I had gone to a protest held between the Treasury Building and Boston Consulting Group\u2019s office, where protesters were holding placards that read \u201cDeport President Musk\u201d and \u201cAfrikaner Go Home\u201d.) In one corner of the room, there were two armchairs and bound copies of the Epstein files. A photoshoot was set up for people to pose with them.<\/p>\n The auditorium next door resembled a Trump rally in that it didn\u2019t really matter what was said on stage because the crowd was there to emote in unison. They cried \u201cShame! Shame! Shame!\u201d when a picture of Trump\u2019s attorney general, Pam Bondi, appeared on screen. I imagined them shouting: \u201cLock her up!\u201d The audience comprised mostly middle-aged women. The frogs beside the stage held signs that read \u201cEff yes\u201d and \u201cDamn Straight\u201d. A Congresswoman from Oregon proclaimed: \u201cJoy is resistance!\u201d<\/p>\n I went outside to find a cigarette. The streets were empty, bar the police vans parked at the intersection. Dildo Man was chatting to three De Niro fans who were hoping to catch a glimpse of their hero. They were shivering in the cold and asked me if he was up there.<\/p>\n \u201cI know where De Niro is, but I can\u2019t tell you,\u201d one of the organisers told me. So I ferreted my way through several corridors with pale lights and squeaky floors and eventually found his press handler who said he could maybe get me a couple minutes with the great man if I stood silently over there next to that filing cabinet beside the two security guards who were whispering about how to protect De Niro once he got on stage.<\/p>\n I leaned against the filing cabinet about ten feet away from the handler in a narrow hallway, approaching him every now and then to ask whether De Niro had said yes, only for him to shoo me away as though I were a disobedient goat. \u201cI\u2019ll ask, I\u2019ll ask,\u201d was all he would say. I assumed De Niro was elsewhere in this warren of corridors. But after about ten minutes the handler waved me over and opened the very door he was standing right next to.<\/p>\n His frown told me that he didn\u2019t like that De Niro had agreed to the interview. He said I was lucky: the clincher was that I wanted to ask De Niro about Manchester. He had been in the north-west of England in October, as he is an investor in a restaurant in one of the city\u2019s many new skyscrapers. \u201cI\u2019ve heard that Manchester is a place that people are gravitating towards. I heard that,\u201d De Niro told me once I got in, his gritty, New York accent filling the room. \u201cThe people were nice \u2013 we had a nice time.\u201d<\/p>\n His face was covered in shadows. He was sitting beneath a dim light in this tiny back office with a plate of pineapple and grapes in front of him on the table. He couldn\u2019t decide whether \u201ctotalitarianism\u201d or \u201ctyranny\u201d was the right word to describe Trump\u2019s America. I had asked him what the US would look like in ten years. He said that all predictions, including his own, are baloney. But he settled on the idea that Trump was the beginning of a story and not the end. \u201cThere will be another person \u2013 maybe it\u2019ll be in 20 years, or 25 or 30, where we\u2019ll be faced with the same situation: whether you call it totalitarianism or tyranny.\u201d<\/p>\n At the start, he spoke quietly. I couldn\u2019t see his face that clearly. But through the darkness he began to be more animated. I asked him what his greatest fear was. Living in a totalitarian society, he replied. That\u2019s because \u201cthere\u2019s no order, there\u2019s no real structure, there\u2019s no law, there\u2019s no nothing. There\u2019s nothing that anybody can respect,\u201d he said. He was warming to his theme. He started enunciating hard. \u201cYou\u2019re going to respect the mind of someone like Trump to call the shots on everything?\u201d<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t look frail behind his maroon-tinted glasses, but he did look more delicate than when he was on the big screen. His 82 years had left him small in his soft navy jacket, rumpled around his body.<\/p>\n The two minutes I had been promised quickly turned into four, eight, 12. The flack kept coming in and out of the office, pacing to and fro, tapping me on the shoulder to hurry up. He didn\u2019t like this. De Niro raised his hand when the flack tried to wrap things up. He was curious about the state of affairs in Britain. His first instinct is to ask questions when he finds something interesting or he hasn\u2019t thought through his answer. He is humble on every subject but his prognosis for American democracy.<\/p>\n I said resentment in Britain was quickly turning into rage but thankfully the British don\u2019t have guns. He picked at his pineapple. \u201cBut you don\u2019t have guns because you\u2019re civilised,\u201d he said. De Niro is known to the world as the proto-incel who obsessively points a gun at his own reflection in a mirror in Taxi Driver. He seemed to hope that the America he helped depict in that film would always remain a fiction.<\/p>\n One of the best ways to understand an American\u2019s politics is to ask why they think Trump was elected. De Niro\u2019s view is that the education system hasn\u2019t taught children about the dangers of tyranny. I raised some of the other factors that had given rise to Trump: economic inequality, modern angst, the financialisation of day-to-day life, etc. He expanded by pointing out that he was born in 1943 during the Second World War. Growing up in the postwar era, there was a \u201cfeeling of optimism\u201d. \u201cWe came from somewhere. We had the UN. There was a structure.\u201d And then Trump, who, he noted, is only a few years younger than himself, \u201ccomes along and he just doesn\u2019t have a clue as to what that is\u201d. He said something about Trump\u2019s \u201cpersonality\u201d, stopped and concluded: \u201cI don\u2019t\u2026 I don\u2019t even know.\u201d<\/p>\n They had spiralled up together from the same city \u2013 Trump from Queens, De Niro from Manhattan \u2013 to become icons of American masculinity. They were two of the most famous men in the world and patriarchs at the head of sprawling families. But the artist who believed in a postwar America that was young, decent, self-starting, was watching his peer tear apart the country he had spent his life portraying and honouring. They both wanted to wrench different versions of America back from the past. I could feel his anger curdling at the thought that someone as vulgar as Trump was wrecking what he saw as America\u2019s core.<\/p>\n \u201cI guess you must have the equivalent in Great Britain, where you get the con artists and the evangelists, like Tammy Faye Bakker, and then you get them coming in and doing all their bullshit. Right? It\u2019s the same thing. And we have it now on a grand scale with the president of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n It all seemed inexplicable to him, even though he has spent his life chronicling the type of society that spawns avaricious mobsters who are often reminiscent of Trump. In one of the two films De Niro has directed, The Good Shepherd (2006), Joe Pesci\u2019s character lists what America\u2019s minorities can cling to: the Irish have their homeland; the Jews, their tradition; the Italians, their family and church. He then asks Matt Damon\u2019s Waspy CIA agent: \u201cWhat about you people, Mr Carlson, what do you have?\u201d \u201cThe United States of America,\u201d Damon replies. \u201cThe rest of you are just visiting.\u201d<\/p>\n Or perhaps the pain De Niro now feels is rooted in his familiarity with Trump\u2019s character, the nemesis he hoped could be contained with art. But he is less interested in understanding Trump than ending his reign \u2013 and he does not see the two as connected.<\/p>\n \u201cHe never should have even been allowed to become eligible to run to be president,\u201d De Niro said. \u201cYou think that there\u2019d be a way to screen people.\u201d<\/p>\n Isn\u2019t this attitude part of the reason that people voted for Trump?<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re right, but he\u2019s not eligible because he\u2019s just not qualified. Every citizen is allowed the right to run \u2013 blah, blah, blah. That\u2019s all great, but you\u2019d think that there\u2019d be some kind of screening process that everybody has to go through.\u201d<\/p>\n I suggested that, perhaps, this was what we call an election.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, of course, it\u2019s the election, but I think there [should be] a screening process before that. People don\u2019t really know. It\u2019s called low-information voters, whatever. I do the same thing, but there are people doing it in a way that, sadly \u2013 it\u2019s dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n His face finally tightened, one eye more closed than the other, his lip curling inwards, like something was twisting his skin from the inside. \u201cWe have to get this regime out of government. I don\u2019t care what\u2019s falling apart, this and that. There are people like me and many of us. We can\u2019t allow this to happen. This is our country \u2013 we can\u2019t allow it to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTrump does not want to do the right thing,\u201d he said moments before his handler chucked me out. \u201cHe wants to destroy. It\u2019s like having a lunatic driving a fucking tank around the city. You don\u2019t drive tanks in the city. You don\u2019t \u2013 you\u2019re not allowed to. You can\u2019t do it. You can\u2019t run around with a gun, shooting it up. That\u2019s what he\u2019s doing. We can\u2019t have that in any kind of society. Period.\u201d<\/p>\n My time was up. I left De Niro in that small office and walked back through those corridors to the auditorium with the screaming audience and the people dressed as frogs, and waited for his speech.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t spot the security guards when Robert De Niro got up on stage. It was approaching 11pm and the crowd was flagging. De Niro had been waiting backstage for more than two hours by this point, picking at his pineapple in the gloom, ruminating on how his nation had betrayed him, hoping that another speech could rebuild a lost America.<\/p>\n His remarks were a lament for the type of country he remembered from his childhood. \u201cWe all love our country,\u201d he told the room, pausing. \u201cI choke on that phrase\u2026 because our country isn\u2019t so lovable right now.\u201d There were chirps of \u201cRibbit! Ribbit!\u201d from somewhere in the audience.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want the United States of America to be worthy of your love, be ready to take to the streets together,\u201d he said to a roar. \u201cWe will take our country back.\u201d<\/p>\n Where have I heard that before?<\/p>\n [Further reading: Ai Weiwei: \u201cMaybe I\u2019m still seeking trouble\u201d<\/a>]<\/p>\n Content from our partners<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net\/2021\/09\/TNS_master_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
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