Actor Robert DeNiro criticized former President Trump on Friday as the former president is likely to be the GOP presidential nominee in November.
“The guy is a total monster… I don’t understand it,” DeNiro said Friday on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher, referring to polls that show the GOP front-runner leading President Biden, adding that Trump is “such a mean, nasty, hateful person.”
The actor added that he would also refuse any role that requires him to depict Trump because he “can’t see any good in him.”
“Nothing,” DeNiro told Maher. “Nothing at all, nothing redeemable in him.”
He warned that a second Trump administration would be “dangerous,” alluding to the former president’s rhetoric.
“There’ll be things that happen that none of us can imagine,” he said Friday. “That’s what happens in that kind of a dictatorship, which is what he says. Let’s believe and take him at his word.”
“So he’s a sociopathic, psychopathic, malignant narcissist,” he added. “He is a dangerous person.”
Trump hit back Saturday in a post on Truth Social, calling the actor’s comments “stupid.”
“Robert DeNiro has a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” he wrote. “Such a stupid sounding guy, a low IQ individual!”
De Niro made a similar argument against the GOP presidential front-runner last year, claiming “democracy won’t survive” if Trump is reelected. He also referred to him at the time as a “wannabe dictator.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men,” the actor said in a statement read by former Trump aide Miles Taylor in October. “I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty. Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump.”
“When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly. I see an evil one,” he added at the time.
After DeNiro spent spent time knocking the president during an awards speech late last year, the former president said he should focus “on his life, which is a mess, rather than the lives of others.”
“He has become a total loser, as the World watches, waits, and laughs!” Trump wrote.
