Robert De Niro has spent years making his feelings about Donald Trump perfectly clear.
This time, he didn’t bother cleaning up the language.
Speaking at the “Hands Off Our Vote” event in New York ahead of the November midterm elections, the legendary actor delivered a fiery speech focused on voting rights, Trump and the Republican Party.
De Niro began by arguing that the Trump administration’s policies were becoming increasingly unpopular.
Then he turned to what he described as efforts to restrict voting rights.
“They can’t get support from the voters,” De Niro told the crowd. “So what do they do? They try to take our votes away.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Hands off our votes.”
Then De Niro decided to put the message a little more bluntly.
“Let me put it another way,” he said.
“Keep your fucking hands off our vote.”
And that became the refrain for what followed.
De Niro turned his speech into a call-and-response, moving from congressional Republicans to the Supreme Court and the Trump administration.
He accused “weak and spineless Republicans” in Congress of failing to protect voting rights.
His response?
“Keep your fucking hands off our votes.”
He criticized the Supreme Court over decisions he characterized as enabling voter suppression.
Again:
“Hands off our vote.”
De Niro then took aim at the Justice Department, referencing the administration’s efforts involving state voter rolls and election officials.
Those efforts have become a major political and legal flashpoint ahead of the midterms.
The Trump administration has defended its election-related actions as efforts to protect election integrity and ensure voter rolls comply with federal law. Critics and voting-rights advocates have challenged aspects of those efforts and warned they could threaten legitimate voters’ access to the ballot.
De Niro clearly falls into the latter camp.
He also invoked immigration enforcement, accusing armed and masked ICE agents of intimidating voters around polling places.
And then he arrived at Trump himself.
De Niro called the president a “coward” and a “fucking piece of shit” before asking the crowd what they should tell Trump if, in De Niro’s words, he tries to take away their “voice and power.”
The answer came back once again:
“Keep your fucking hands off our vote.”
De Niro wasn’t finished.
He shifted from attacking Trump to urging the audience to act in the midterm elections.
With control of Congress at stake, the actor called on the crowd to “take back the House,” “take back the Senate,” “take back the power” and “take back our country.”
De Niro’s appearance was part of an event that also featured actor Mark Ruffalo, who delivered his own warning about voting rights and even invoked his most famous Marvel character, telling the crowd he was ready to “Hulk out.”
But De Niro’s message required no movie reference.
It was explicit, repetitive and impossible to misunderstand.
After years of publicly feuding with Trump, the Oscar-winning actor used the approaching midterms to make his position clear once again.
Only this time, he boiled the entire message down to six words:
“Keep your fucking hands off our vote.”
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