Robert De Niro's Feud With Donald Trump Started Long Before He Took Office

It's no secret that Robert De Niro hates Donald Trump. The iconic actor started making waves when he spoke out against Trump during the 2016 election, but De Niro's feelings about the president go further back than many think. The "Taxi Driver" star was going after the former host of "The Apprentice" as far back as 2011, and it all started with Barack Obama.

While Trump had been famous since the 1980s, his political period really took hold when he became the major voice behind the fabricated "Birtherism" movement, which claimed that Obama was not actually born in the United States. The entire conspiracy was built on a foundation of false reports and a misunderstanding of immigration law, but it took root and became an ongoing annoyance for Obama. Trump especially liked to push the conspiracy, even claiming to have sent investigators to Hawaii and telling Meredith Vieira on "Today" that "I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding."

None of this sat well with De Niro, who decided to take on his fellow New Yorker. De Niro laid into Trump in an April 2011 interview with NBC News (via Los Angeles Times): "Don't go out there and say things unless you can back them up. How dare you? That's awful to do." Trump, unsurprisingly, didn't take De Niro's critique lying down. Instead, he went on "Fox & Friends" and attacked De Niro's intelligence, saying, "we're not dealing with Albert Einstein." 

Less than a month later, Obama took the stage at the White House Correspondents Dinner and mocked the birtherism movement and Trump, who was in attendance. It would be another five years before Trump finally admitted that Obama was born in the United States.

Robert De Niro is one of the most vocal celebrities when it comes to Donald Trump. In 2016, De Niro took part in a #VoteYourFuture ad featuring a number of celebrities, including Zendaya, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Samuel L. Jackson explaining why it's important to vote. The ad was meant to be bipartisan and avoid taking sides in the election, but leaked behind-the-scenes-footage made it clear that De Niro had a lot to say about Trump, calling the president "blatantly stupid," "a pig," and "a bozo."

Just after Trump won in 2016, De Niro told The Guardian that he would give Trump "the benefit of the doubt," but that wouldn't last long. In May 2017, the Film Society of Lincoln Center gave De Niro the Chaplin Award. The night consisted of fellow actors and filmmakers giving speeches about working with De Niro, but the man of the hour used his time on stage to discuss Trump's attempt to cut the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, calling it "bulls***" (via Entertainment Weekly).

In 2018, De Niro was much more direct when he spoke at the Tony Awards, simply saying, via Guardian News, "F*** Trump." De Niro continued to call out Trump during the president's second term, and in February 2026, the actor spoke at the Counter-State of the Union, where he said he felt heartbroken but had not given up. "I'm not going anywhere," he told the audience, per Forbes Breaking News. "This is my house. My home." In response, Trump took to Truth Social and called De Niro "sick and demented" before complaining about Rosie O'Donnell, who was not part of the event.