The De Niro Verdict

Actor Robert De Niro has done his country a favour by making explicit what the New York trial of Donald Trump was really about, and it wasn’t dodgy accounting:

I love this city. I love this city. I don’t want to destroy it. Donald Trump wants to destroy, not only the city, but the country, and eventually he could destroy the world… I don’t mean to scare you. No, no, wait, maybe I do mean to scare you. If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted. And elections, forget about it. That’s over, that’s done. If he gets in, I can tell you right now, he will never leave. He will never leave. You know that. He will never leave.

Trump isn’t running for mayor in New York, but so what. As for destroying the world, we have just learned that the current President has authorised Ukraine to fire missiles into Russian sovereign territory, building on Kiev’s partial destruction of Russia’s strategic early warning system in Krasnodar Krai a week ago. This echoes Lord Cameron’s ‘fire away’ call on 3 May and a similar Franco-German one a couple of days ago.

Take that planned summer holiday now, before these people get us all killed.

De Niro was a prominent diner at the Golden Globes in 2020, where Ricky Gervaise told the luvvies:

So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

Maybe De Niro was noisily eating some crisps at this point, for he clearly missed that lesson.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (Republican) swiftly issued a statement on the Trump verdict, accusing the District Attorney, the trial judge and his family of politically motivated bias.

The issues are now much bigger than what to do about the preening, blustering Golden Oaf. The focus is on the danger to social cohesion when the institutions of society cease to be clearly impartial, and the electorate is to be swayed by ignorant and hysterical public entertainers.