The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be ‘the end of the world’) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: ‘Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for’ – or as I wrote here in the spring: ‘How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an actual repelling effect?’

We get more set in our ways as we get older, though, so it’s unlikely that 82-year-old Robert De Niro will see the light and stop making a fool of himself over politics in general – and the Potus in particular – any time soon. He’s directed judgments such as ‘evil’ and statements like ‘I can’t wait to see him in jail’ at Donald Trump for more than a decade now; also deranged declamations such as: ‘He has no empathy. I don’t know where or what he is, but he’s an alien. It’s something deeply psychological in him, he wants to hurt people. He wants to hurt this country.’ Not just the country but New York City specifically, for some reason: even though he grew up there, apparently enjoyed a swinging single life there and has lots of property there, ‘Donald Trump wants to destroy not only the city, but the country and eventually he could destroy the world’.

As far as De Niro is concerned, no plans are too sinister to ascribe to Trump, who’s just three years his junior at 79. ‘We cannot let up on him because he is not going to leave the White House… we’ve had two and a half centuries of democracy… we fought in two world wars to preserve it. Now we have a would-be king who wants to take it away. King Donald the First. Fuck that. We’re rising up again… we’re all in this together, indivisible with........

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