Actor Robert De Niro, a frequent antagonist of President Donald Trump, continued his campaign against him, calling him a "real racist" and a white supremacist, in an interview with The Guardian.
The paper reported De Niro is generally standoffish with media, but was "warm, generous with his time and even garrulous, at least on the subject of Trump" with the Guardian, perhaps because it is often critical of the U.S. president, too.
"I'm older now and I'm just upset about what’s going on," De Niro told The Guardian. "When you see someone like [Trump] becoming president, I thought, well, OK, let's see what he does – maybe he'll change – but he just got worse.
"It showed me that he is a real racist. I thought maybe as a New Yorker he understands the diversity in the city, but he's as bad as I thought he was before – and much worse. It's a shame. It's a bad thing in this country."
When asked later by The Guardian if De Niro would consider President Trump a "white supremacist," he replied, "instantly," according to The Guardian: "Yes."
And how about being a facist? The Guardian asked.
"I guess that's what it leads to," De Niro replied. "If he had his way, we'd wind up in a very bad state in this country. I mean, the way I understand it, they laughed at Hitler. They all look funny. Hitler looked funny, Mussolini looked funny and other dictators and despots look funny.
"What bothers me is that there will be people in the future who see him as an example and they'll be affected in some way, but they'll be a lot smarter and have many more colors to their personality and be more mercurial and become someone with the same values as he has but able to get much further and do more damage as a despot.
"That's my worry. There are people who look up to him: 'I want to be like him.' But they'll do it much better, and they'll be more smart about it."
De Niro's rejection did not stop there.
"He's a con artist; he's a huckster; he's a scam artist," De Niro told The Guardian. "And what bothers me is that people don't see that. I think that 'The Apprentice' had a lot to do with that, which I never saw but once, maybe.
"It's all smoke and mirrors. It's all bullsh—."