Top Trump aide Stephen Miller took to Fox News on Wednesday night to rage against Robert De Niro, blasting the two-time Oscar winner as only making “flops” and “failures” over the past three decades.
Miller, one of the key architects behind Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and mass deportation operation, tore into De Niro after the Hollywood star compared him to Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist during a recent MSNBC appearance.
“We see it all the time—[Trump] will not want to leave,” De Niro exclaimed on The Weekend. “He set it up with, I guess he’s the Goebbels of the cabinet, Stephen Miller.”
Doubling down on the comparison, De Niro went on to directly accuse Miller – who is Jewish – of being a Nazi. “Yes, he is, and he should be ashamed of himself,” the Raging Bull star asserted.
During an appearance on Trump confidant Sean Hannity’s primetime show on Wednesday night, Miller – who recently called the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” and is spearheading the administration’s “all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism” – was asked by the Fox host whether he was thinking about suing De Niro.
While the White House deputy chief of staff largely sidestepped the possibility of taking the actor to court, he did take the opportunity to lob his own series of insults at the Hollywood legend – which included taking shots at his recent body of work.
“Robert De Niro is a sad, bitter, broken old man who is mostly enraged because he has not made a movie worth watching in at least 30 years,” Miller sneered. “Probably the longest string of flops, failures, embarrassments.”
Miller went on to claim that De Niro “has been degrading himself on camera with one horrific film after another for my entire adult life, and he is not taken seriously by anybody.” He also insisted that De Niro no longer garners the respect of his friends, family, or the acting community.
“He is a shell of a man, and everyone disregards everything he says,” Miller growled.
Miller’s tirade echoed recent comments made by White House communications director Steven Cheung, who has become the president’s chief insult-thrower during the second Trump administration.
“Robert DeNiro is a washed up has-been who hasn’t been relevant in 30 years,” Cheung said in a statement following De Niro’s MSNBC interview. “Now, he just beclowns himself by spewing hate speech and inciting violence against others. Instead of embarrassing himself every time he speaks, he should seek immediate treatment for a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut sized brain.”
Despite the White House officials' claims of irrelevance, De Niro has appeared in several critically acclaimed and commercially successful films in recent years. For instance, he picked up a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for 2012’s Oscar-winning hit Silver Linings Playbook.
On top of that, he starred in the box office smash Joker in 2019, which scored Joaquin Phoenix a Best Actor award and invoked some of De Niro’s past collaborations with director Martin Scorsese, notably Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.
In fact, his recent work with Scorsese has earned him Oscar nominations over the past few years. He was a producer on the Best Picture-nominated The Irishman, a historical drama about the Teamsters and union boss Jimmy Hoffa, in which he also starred. And he also picked up another Best Supporting Actor nod for Scorsese’s 2023 epic Killers of the Flower Moon, which focuses on a series of murders of Osage tribe members in 1920s Oklahoma.
De Niro has been a vociferous and outspoken critic of Trump’s for nearly a decade now, describing the president as “totally nuts” and a “stupid bully” who is similar to past fascist leaders, all while claiming he uses the “the same playbook as Mussolini, as Hitler, as a dictator, wannabe dictators.”
And just last month, he harkened back to his role in the gangster classic Goodfellas when he mockingly portrayed Trump’s handpicked FCC chairman Brendan Carr on Jimmy Kimmel Live! This was host Jimmy Kimmel’s first show back on the air following a brief preemption, which saw Carr seemingly threaten ABC and parent company Disney over Kimmel’s remarks about slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
