Trump rips De Niro after awards speech: ‘He has become a total loser’

Former President Trump lashed out at Robert De Niro in a social media post Sunday, after the actor dedicated part of an awards speech last week to criticizing the former president.

“De Niro 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 in a post on his Truth Social platform.

Trump’s attack comes after De Niro accused organizers of the Gotham Awards ceremony last Monday of editing his prepared speech, which he was set to read from the teleprompter, and removing remarks he planned to give that criticized the former president.

In the middle of presenting the award for Historical Icon and Creator Tribute, he paused, apparently realizing his speech had been edited. He then reached for his phone to pull up an earlier version of the speech and told the crowd, “I just want to say one thing. The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out, I didn’t know about it. And I want to read it.”

In the original version of the speech, De Niro attacked what he said was Trump’s propensity for lying and called him a charlatan.

“History isn’t history anymore,” De Niro said. “Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness.”

“Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal,” De Niro said. “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. But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul.”

He added that Trump “attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows disrespect, for example, by using Pocahontas as a slur.”

In Trump’s post, he attacked De Niro for using a teleprompter, a standard practice at awards ceremonies.

“Robert De Niro, whose acting talents have greatly diminished, with his reputation now shot, must even use a teleprompter for his foul and disgusting language, so disrespectful to our Country,” Trump wrote in his post.

“He has become unwatchable both in movies, and with the FOOLS that destroyed the Academy Awards, bringing them from one of the top shows in the Country to a Low Rated afterthought,” he added, also attacking the academy.

De Niro has frequently been critical of the president in the past several years, but he recently upped the stakes in his warning against another Trump administration, saying, “Democracy won’t survive the return of a wannabe dictator.”

In a statement in October, the “Godfather” actor reflected on his experience studying criminals, saying, “I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty. Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump,” adding, “When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly. I see an evil one.”

“Even criminals usually have a sense of right and wrong. Whether they do the right thing or not is a different story, but they have a moral code, however warped,” he continued in October. “Donald Trump does not. He’s a wannabe tough guy. With no morals or ethics. No sense of right or wrong. No regard for anyone but himself: Not the people he was supposed to lead and protect, not the people he does business with, not the people who follow him blindly and loyally, not even the people who consider themselves as friends. He has contempt for all of them.”