Robert De Niro Calls Out Trump at Award Show

Legendary actor Robert De Niro put Donald Trump on blast in a speech at the Gotham Awards film ceremony—after accusing Apple of editing the speech in his teleprompter.

De Niro, a longstanding critic of the former president, was on stage presenting an award for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a movie in which he stars.

Mid-way through his presentation speech, De Niro paused and reached for his phone, saying, “The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out, I didn’t know about it. And I want to read it.”

From his phone, De Niro began to criticize the current state of American discourse.

“Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness,” De Niro said. He cited controversial changes to Florida’s public school curriculum, which mandates teaching students that slaves “developed skills” in bondage that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”

From there, he condemned Donald Trump.

“Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution,” said De Niro, “But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul.”

For context, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker calculated that Trump told 35,000 falsehoods during his four years in office.

“He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows disrespect, for example, by using Pocahontas as a slur,” De Niro added, referring to Trump’s racist nickname for Democratic Senator and former presidential rival Elizabeth Warren, who has some Native American ancestry.

Native Americans feature prominently in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is about White capitalists’ attempt to exploit the mineral rights of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma.

The speech was ultimately supposed to thank Apple for producing the film, De Niro said, but he was disinclined to do so after swathes of his speech were summarily deleted.

“I don’t feel like thanking them at all, for what they did. How dare they do that, actually.”

Video credits.