Robert De Niro tries to win back some goodwill by calling Donald Trump “totally nuts”
Back in March, Robert De Niro attracted a lot of controversy when he decided to include anti-vaccination documentary Vaxxed in the lineup for the Tribeca Film Festival (which he co-founded). Vaxxed was made by Andrew Wakefield, the guy behind the thoroughly discredited, entirely inaccurate, and wildly dangerous study supposedly linking vaccinations to autism, and De Niro—who has a child with autism—thought including the film in the festival would be a good way to inspire discussion. Apparently, though, De Niro didn’t realize just how controversial and offensive the anti-vaccination movement is to some people, so he decided to pull the film after everybody got mad at him.
Now, perhaps to prove that his brief foray into almost endorsing something awful was just a fluke, De Niro has declared that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is “totally nuts.” He made that statement while presenting a restored print of Taxi Driver at the Sarajevo Film Festival this weekend, explaining that Trump’s surprising popularity and tendency to do shocking things reminds him of Travis Bickle, the antihero he plays in the 1976 film. That’s from Deadline, which quotes De Niro as suggesting that Trump says “totally crazy, ridiculous stuff” and that—like Bickle—he “shouldn’t be where he is so…god help us.”
Deadline points out that Trump has yet to say anything negative about De Niro on Twitter, but he’ll probably get to it when he’s done taking on The New York Times over this whole thing.