'Make an example of this guy': MAGA pundit wants vengeance on De Niro

Actor Robert De Niro keeps criticizing President Donald Trump — and now pro-Trump commentator Bill O’Reilly wants Trump to “make an example” of the two-time Oscar-winning thespian.

In response to De Niro telling MS NOW’s Nicole Wallace that if Trump refuses to leave office after the end of his term “we have to make him leave,” O’Reilly insisted without evidence in his podcast that De Niro was actually threatening the president’s life.

“What do you mean by that?” O’Reilly asked. “He’s elected. Seventy-seven million people voted for him. What’s ‘we got to get rid of him’? Are you talking about impeachment? What are you talking about?”

After saying it is illegal to “knowingly and willfully” threaten the president, O’Reilly urged Trump to “make an example of this guy,” adding De Niro “better have a lawyer” because he believes the Secret Service should interrogate him.

O’Reilly anti-De Niro rant comes mere days after Trump’s own anti-De Niro rant. While criticizing two progressive Democrats who shouted “You have killed Americans!” at him during his State of the Union address, Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Trump lumped them in with De Niro and former talk show host Rosie O’Donnell (another frequent Trump critic).

“When you watch Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as they screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event, they had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. After saying “they are Crooked and Corrupt Politicians” and “we should send them back from where they came — as fast as possible,” he added they “should actually get on a boat with Trump Deranged Robert De Niro, another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying — some of which is seriously CRIMINAL!”

It is unclear whether O’Reilly was aware of Trump’s previous threat against De Niro’s First Amendment rights when he called for Trump to “make an example of him.”

In his social media post, Trump added “When I watched him break down in tears last night, much like a child would do, I realized that he may be even sicker than Crazy Rosie O’Donnell, who is right now in Ireland trying to figure out how to come back into our beautiful United States.”

He concluded, “The only difference between De Niro and Rosie is that she is probably somewhat smarter than him, which isn’t saying much. The good news is that America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before, and it’s driving them absolutely crazy!”

Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival in France last year, De Niro said that in America “we are fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted. That affects all of us here, because art is the crucible that brings people together, like tonight. Art looks for truth. Art embraces diversity. That’s why art is a threat.”

He added, “That’s why we are a threat to autocrats and fascists. America’s philistine president ha[s] had himself appointed head of one of our premier cultural institutions [the Kennedy Center]," he continued while the crowd applauded. "He has cut funding and support to the arts, humanities and education.”

De Niro was similarly scathing toward Trump in 2023, telling The Guardian that he channeled Trump’s character when playing William Hale, the real-life early 20th century Oklahoma crime boss convicted of cattle rustling, contract killings and insurance fraud during the Osage Indian murders. De Niro depicted Hale in director Martin Scorsese’s award-winning epic film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The Guardian wrote that "at a press conference earlier in the day, De Niro had suggested that Hale's kind of immorality – his entitlement and greed, his racism, his disregard for anyone outside his own bloodline, all of it wrapped up in a kindly aspect – is easy to spot in contemporary politics, in what was a not-so-veiled swing at Trump and a broader swipe at members of the Republican party, accessories to the chaos."

When it comes to the question of whether the First Amendment protects speech that could be construed loosely as threatening to the president, the Supreme Court settled that matter in the 2015 Supreme Court case Elonis v. United States, which revolved around the 2007 Whitest Kids U Know sketch “It’s Illegal to Say…” In that sketch comedian Trevor Moore repeatedly said “I want to kill the President of the United States of America” in various forms before then explaining for the audience that those phrasings were all illegal. After a man named Anthony Douglas Elonis repurposed the sketch to target his wife, the constitutionality of even implying a threat regardless of the context appeared before the Supreme Court, which reversed Elonis’ conviction by 8-to-1.

“As far as making a big splash, I don’t think you can beat going to the Supreme Court,” Moore told Salon about the case in 2020.