Robert De Niro Rips Into ‘Stupid Bully’ Trump, Compares Him to Hitler in MSNBC Interview

Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro has been outspoken about former President Donald Trump since the latter’s first run for president, and in a new interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, he went as far as comparing Trump’s rise to that of Hitler’s.

For a full segment on The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle on Thursday, De Niro called Trump a variety of things, from “a sick person” to “narcissistic” to a “monster” and a “stupid bully.” But De Niro was also concerned about the possibility of Trump returning to the Oval Office, and how “dangerous” that would be.

But aside from the name-calling — which was funny, because De Niro specifically said at the top of the segment “I’m tired of calling him names” — De Niro told Ruhle that he doesn’t think people “understand” where another trump presidency could lead. He, however, has an idea:

Ruhle: What do you say to those who say, “I don’t like the guy, but I’m going to vote for him”? What’s your message to that?

De Niro: I don’t understand it. I don’t I don’t think they understand how dangerous it will be if he ever, God forbid, becomes president. I don’t think they really understand. And historically, from what I see, even in Nazi Germany, they had it with Hitler. They don’t take him seriously. “He looks like a clown. Acts like a clown.” Mussolini. Same thing. These guys, I don’t know why they look like clowns. They somehow people… That element of society identifies in some ways with them. But it would be chaos beyond our imagination. There’s no mystery about him. He’s right out front. And what he says is what it’ll be if he becomes president.

That wasn’t De Niro’s only invocation of Hitler:

We always hear about people from Eastern Europe, the Jews from other parts of Eastern Europe, from Western Europe coming over. Look what happened with France, and with the Nazis and so on. And they come over and you hear these, and they go, and when I was a kid, they’d say, “You don’t really appreciate this country, you know, what we know from experience.” Imagine what those people went through. I’m just starting to see it. You know, as a kid, I said “Hitler, it’s a nightmare that never would happen.” But now I see that it’s possible. But those people, sometimes I run into some people who are close to my age, who are from Eastern Europe, European countries or even Nazi Germany and, you know, they… you understand it.

He also told Ruhle: “Trouble with Trump is he’s not just a bully, he’s a stupid bully.”

This also wasn’t the first time De Niro invoked Hitler while discussing Trump. He told MSNBC’s Ari Melber in 2020 that he ran using “the same playbook as Mussolini, as Hitler, as a dictator, wannabe dictators.”

Watch the video above via MSNBC.