Robert De Niro and the wrong kind of politics

The problem with Robert De Niro wasn’t that he brought politics to the Tony Awards. It was that he brought the wrong kind.

“F–k Trump,” he announced when he took the stage to introduce Bruce Springsteen. “It’s no longer down with Trump, but f–k Trump.” The stars sitting in front of him roared in approval. Those at home heard bleeps instead, but they didn’t miss the message — and they weren’t as receptive to the rhetoric.

De Niro hadn’t angered only conservatives. Plenty of card-carrying liberals and culture critics were mad, too. The sentiment may have earned their sympathy, but the delivery, they complained, was a total flop. The issue for these Tony fans wasn’t that De Niro was distracting from the art the event exists to celebrate, or even that he had used his introduction to upstage the man it was supposed to set up. It was that De Niro had struck a discordant note during a night when, otherwise, the political tenor had been pointed but restrained.

Meryl Streep’s stirring address at the Golden Globes last year felt like a third-act call to arms — “Disrespect invites disrespect.Violence incites violence” — and watchers were right there with her. “F–k Trump,” on the other hand, is more “Beavis and Butt-Head” than Henry V at Agincourt.

We don’t want to feel as if we’re butt-heads, too. But the truth is, saying everyone should bake everyone else a cake won’t change the minds of any actual bakers, and all the welcoming, kind and generous people in the nation can’t change an administration’s cruel and unwelcoming policies.

Throwing around curse words with no substance behind them is not an admirable form of resistance, and De Niro isn’t going to persuade Trump voters to join his side by doing it. Yet we’re fooling ourselves if we think the meaningful statements of more decorous celebrities holding aloft their trophies are going to accomplish anything, either. Their speechifying might make us sleep better after the credits roll, but in the end, whether an awards ceremony is full of subtle criticisms or crude slurs, it’s all just a show.

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