PK in The National: Has Robert De Niro found his most important role: taking on Trump?
De Niro's exploration of broken masculinity across his career qualifies him well for the job
This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my weekly column in The National, published Saturday, May 17th, 2025
IN a time of gaseous, wannabe patriarchs, there ambled on to the Cannes stage someone who has a good chance of being the real thing.
With a soft kiss and a tender hug for Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro accepted his lifetime achievement Palme D’Or award earlier this week.
What does an authentic patriarch (or for that matter, matriarch) do? Identify the threat to the tribe, gather forces for self-defence and self-belief. Small and bowed, craggy and thinning-greying, De Niro stepped up.
Without missing a beat, the actor launched into his Trump attacks. This “philistine president” cuts arts budgets; tries to put a “tariff on creativity”; attacks creatives for their commitments to “diversity” and “inclusion”; sees artists as a threat “to autocrats and fascists” (like him).
Bob’s quiet Brooklyn tones ended with a flourish to the assembled cinecrats, wreathed with his anxiety about democracy’s survival in his country: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité!”
De Niro is rarely this polite in his objections to the Caligularity. His signature routine is to stroll up to a live mic and state: “Fuck Trump … Fuck him.” It comes with a rich shower of other epithets.
“The jerk-off-in-chief”. “The baby-in-chief”. “A total loser … a wannabe gangster”. “A punk, a dog, a pig, a con, a bullshit artist, a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, a bozo…”
And from that famous black-and-white 2016 presidential campaign video, this: “Trump says he wants to punch people in the face … Well … I’d like to punch him in the face.”
Post-assassination attempt, De Niro has dialled this stuff down. On the Cannes stage, he stated: “Unlike a film, we can’t just all sit back and watch [the Trump regime]. We have to act, and we have to act now – without violence, but with great passion and determination.”
Yet the question is begged: how effective, wherever he sets the dial, is De Niro’s macho resistance against the broligarch-in-chief? Does this kind of “hard talk” just reinforce the “manosphere” that has been driving Trump’s rise to power?
There’s an obvious (though crass) swipe to be made against De Niro. A career built on entertaining audiences with cold-hearted, pathological, calculating, murderous males is hardly a solid perch from which to, as it were, fire broadsides at Trump.
It’s certainly crass, if you dwell with the artistry of De Niro’s work. He’s covered the waterfront of post-Second World War masculinity, in ways that both subvert and reinforce stereotypes.
Take Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull (1973-80). These are existential man-children, alienated and repressed, unable to reconcile tenderness with violence.
It’s chastening to think that the corroded manhood we worry about these days was fully channelled by wartime-framed characters like Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta and Mike Vronsky.
De Niro (and Martin Scorsese) completed their prophecy by doing The King Of Comedy in 1982. This captures very early the psychological distortions that celebrity-mania brings to broken, exhausted citizens.
De Niro’s 90s movies – like Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, and Heat – again are, in retrospect, prophetic about our times.
Here’s your full range of criminal patriarchs – not railing against the system, but seeking mastery of their own version of it. And suffering an internal collapse, as they cut their deals, follow their codes of honour, show affection as the feint before a kill.
You might imagine explicit masculinists – no doubt Trump among them – lauding these characters as men in action, getting things executed (at every level). But again, attend to De Niro’s performance. He shows the deadened emotional abyss behind the organisational front.
In his 2000s and 2010s films, like Meet The Parents, Silver Linings Playbook, The Good Shepherd and The Intern, De Niro is embodying those confused elder men, clinging to structures of traditional respect, that comprise much of Trump’s electoral demographic.
They’re suspicious and surveillant, trying to reinject meaning and emotion where it’s not wanted. But De Niro plays this with pathos and irony. It’s counter to some MAGA-style affirmation of the values of the past.
De Niro’s late roles – the strongest being The Irishman (2019) and Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023) – are haunted by the crimes and misdemeanours of being powerful, untrammelled men.
Males aren’t unrelentingly dominant here – they’re busy reckoning with their past, what they’ve done and what they were too cowardly to stop. De Niro’s current political fury against Trump often focuses on his sheer heedlessness, regarding the harsh effects of the policies he imposes through executive order.
Indeed, it’s as if De Niro’s brutal and relentless denunciations of Trump are rooted in his mourning of all the varieties of broken and damaged men he has played in his career.
Who better than De Niro to see what a poor construction Trump makes of his masculinity? A yearning for restoration – loud, resentful, imperial – which is actually a pathetic fantasy. One which De Niro’s long list of characters refute. They know (at least eventually) that aggression has costs, honour is a trap and total control is a complete farce.
So, a sit-down with the young men in your life around some key movies in the De Niro canon might well be an effective antidote to “manosphere” blues. But that implies, in the first place, that these souls could physically disengage from the algorithm-driven devices that catch them in their snares.
Compared to the shadowy, soulful monsters of De Niro’s masculine characters, “the tech-bro” is a telling update. These aren’t mobsters or vigilantes but biohackers, aiming to maximise their productivity. They’re self-branding males who build their sense of value from their optimisations, not their obligations.
Their aim isn’t really control of the streets – it’s control of the self, or the simulation of it. And this by means of computer code (as crypto), physical fitness, social status, charisma. Yet the cost, across the eras, is the same: emotional suppression, distrust of intimacy and a denial of relational vulnerability.
What De Niro’s archive of masculinity can point out is that the manosphere sets up young men to fail, as the criteria for success is increasingly unreal.
Look at the pathetic or bloodied ends of the leads in Raging Bull and Heat: super-capable and agentic men, but utterly alone at the end of their days. In the closing sequences of The Irishman, De Niro’s character Frank Sheeran sits in a care home, forgotten and abandoned.
Sheeran has shown terrifying levels of impersonality in his killing career over the preceding three hours. Now, so confused he doesn’t know whether it’s Christmas or not, Frank asks the nurse if his door could be left open. This is a last nod to his security days –even his final descent still not free of the old paranoias.
A diet of De Niro is certainly not enough for confused and direction-blurred young men to clarify and deepen themselves. We need more positive narratives and worlds made for them – the absence of which opens up the channels in which maleficent political operators can foment grievance.
As the gender researcher Alice Lassman wrote in Newsweek this March, “reclaiming what makes masculinity so endearing – its honesty, integrity and discipline – has never been more essential to the survival of our democracy … Make no mistake: the emerging definition of manhood consolidates Trump’s power, encouraging conformity to an ideal that is out of reach.”
Artistically, De Niro has tested to destruction the masks of manhood that our damaged societies of the 20th and 21st centuries asked us to wear. At a moment of dangerous crisis for male power, he’s doing what he can – which is not perfect – to point out our old pathologies. It may be his most important role to date.
Subscribe to The National here.