You talkin’ to me?
by digby
Award winning actor Robert De Niro on Saturday compared Donald Trump to his mentally unstable character Travis Bickle in the 1976 movie “Taxi Driver,” calling the Republican nominee “totally nuts.”
“But I think now they are really starting to push back, the media … finally they are starting to say: Come on Donald, this is ridiculous, this is nuts, this is insane,” said De Niro at the Sarajevo Film Festival, according to Reuters.
“What he has been saying is totally crazy, ridiculous, stuff that shouldn’t be even … he is totally nuts.”
“I don’t know, it’s crazy that people like Donald Trump … he shouldn’t even be where he is, so God help us,” De Niro said as the Sarajevo National Theater erupted in applause.
The movie festival also marked the 40th anniversary of “Taxi Driver,” where De Niro played the main character Bickle.
“One of the things to me was just the irony at the end, he (Bickle) is back driving a cab, celebrated, which is kind of relevant in some way today too,” De Niro added, according to the Associated Press.
I’ve been seeing a vigilante fantasy in Trump for a while (as has Rick Perlstein.) Law and order is only for the kind of folks who live in Ferguson.
On the stump last week-end, Donald Trump entertained his followers in the wake of the massacre in Oregon with colorful fantasies of him walking down the street, pulling a gun on a would-be assailant and taking him out right there on the sidewalk. He said, “I have a license to carry in New York, can you believe that? Somebody attacks me, they’re gonna be shocked,” at which point he mimes a quick draw:
As the crowd applauds and cheers, he goes on to say “somebody attacks me, oh they’re gonna be shocked. Can you imagine? Somebody says, oh there’s Trump, he’s easy pickins…” And then he pantomimes the quick draw again:
Everybody laughs. And then Trump talks about an old Charles Bronson vigilante movie and they all chanted the name “Death Wish” together. Keep in mind that this sophomoric nonsense took place just two days after a disturbed man went into a classroom and shot 17 people.
Taxi Driver fits in nicely.
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