Joker and The Irishman actor Robert De Niro claims that director Martin Scorsese told him that he believes President Donald Trump will use the pretext of a new war in order to secure a third term in office.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, De Niro states:
“I’m worried because if he gets re-elected, it’s gonna be very, very bad—very bad on a lot of levels. We already have a lot of reparations, if you will—repairs—to do to the damage that he’s already done, and he has to be gotten out.”
He continues:
“He’s going to be history at one point, though he’d love to be president for life. He jokes about it.”
De Niro then details a theory that he claims he heard from director Martin Scorsese:
“I think that if he became president for a second term he’d try to have a third term, and let smarter people manipulate it into getting us into some kind of altercation: a war.”
He then makes it crystal clear he heard this idea from Scorsese:
“The only other president who served a third term was Roosevelt because he was in a war, and this fool would go and start something. This was what Marty Scorsese was saying, and I said, ‘Marty, I never thought of that. I never thought he’d go for a third term if there was a war or something.”
https://youtu.be/XDsfYbbe0WY
Related: The Irishman Review: An Early-Bird Special for Gangsters
De Niro makes this connection due to Trump’s enjoyment of memes and him joking about the Chinese President’s Xi Jinping’s lifetime appointment by the Chinese Communist Party after they removed their own term limits:
“Trump joked about being ‘president for life’ with [Chinese president Xi Jinping] and so-on, he’ll pardon anybody, he’ll do anything. The day after he was elected, I went on a TV show and said I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and say that I hope he won’t be as bad as I think he will be, but he’s turned out to be a lot worse.”
Related: Martin Scorsese Shuts Down Journalist Question Lack of Female Characters in His Films
The actor follows up by claiming that he’s not a very political person, though over the last two years he’s become quite vocal in his opposition to the current administration as well as his support for the past Clinton Campaign:
“I’m not really political but I saw when [Trump] would go to those rallies and he’d say, ‘I want to get this person and punch him in the face,’ and I’d think, how dare this person have this kind of a rally? How dare you do that!”
De Niro continued to express his disgust at President Donald Trump saying, “I’m just so incensed by this guy. He’s conning people every day. It’s a blight on our country. We have a lot of making-up to do to earn back people’s trust, and to get back on track where certain allies will trust us enough to know that we won’t allow an idiot to get in office again.”
The Irishman and Joker are both currently in Theaters.