Actor Robert DeNiro may have offended the entire Jewish community in Germany after claiming he could “understand” people who lived under Nazi rule because of former President Donald Trump.
During an interview on MSNBC with Stephanie Ruhle on the former President’s criminal trials, the Taxi Driver star said he witnessed Trump’s “BS” for many years.
“I think of how absurd it is,” DeNiro replied said.
“And this might be the one case where that could be it for him. It’s a state case.”
“It’s the least important in many ways, and yet it’s the one that could be tried and finished in a well enough time for people to just take that in.
“You’ve played a lot of bad guys. Would you ever play Donald Trump?” asked Ruhle later in the interview.
“Never,” DeNiro responded.
“There’s nothing about him—there’s not one redeeming thing in him that I can see, ever… He actually became President; he could have done good things.”
“Instead, he just had to do it all wrong, he’s so, as we all know, so narcissistic, so self-centered.”
DeNiro then made the radical claim that he understood the perspectives of people who lived in Europe during the Nazis, comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler.
“I think that other people are gonna have to stand up, and just, because it’s either that, or you’re gonna find yourself in a situation that’s so terrifying,” DeNiro said.
“We always hear about people from Eastern Europe, the Jews from other parts of Eastern Europe, from Western Europe coming over—look what happened in France, with the Nazis and so on, and they come over, and you hear these—when I was a kid, they’d say, ‘you don’t really appreciate this country.”
“We know from experience.’ Imagine what those people went through.”
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“I’m just starting to see it. You know as a kid I said Hitler’s a nightmare that would never happen, but now I see that it’s possible, but those people—sometimes I run into some people who are close to my age from Eastern Europe, European countries or Nazi Germany, you know, they, you understand it.”
