At Trump Trial, De Niro Nails De Niro

As closing remarks began at Donald Trump's criminal case, "Let's Go Brandon" met "You Talkin' To Me?" with hilarious results

I know the Trump trial is serious, and a once and future president could be criminally sentenced any day, but for irony and sheer absurdity, today was hard to top. The ghost of eighties past descended on the courthouse and got his freak on.

Forty years ago, Wall Street made New York the center of America’s cultural universe. Defiantly announcing the country was done apologizing for Vietnam, Watergate, the Church Committee revelations, and other horrors, finance pirates like Ivan Boesky reaffirmed American capitalism with a generational mantra: “Greed is good”! Junk bonds falling like fairy dust turned a downtown of Cinderellas into paper princesses, and everyone in the city seemed on coke, on the make, and proud.

No amount of money was too small to hustle. Spy Magazine, the slick new ironic Bible of the greed era, helped make “short-fingered vulgarian” Donald Trump a celebrity through a stunt that tagged him and Adnan Khashoggi as the only two out of 58 famous rich marks greedy enough to cash 13-cent checks:

SPY’s 13-cent check gag

But Spy in November 1988 also roasted Deer Hunter legend “Bobby” De Niro, putting him as the top name on their list of “Unstoppables,” actors who “lose studios the kind of money normally associated with Pentagon budgets under Republican administrations” but somehow “never go unemployed.” The mag said De Niro flicks were a whopping $89,308,673 in the red, making him the silver screen version of an over-leveraged real estate tycoon. Spy wrote it was “nice Meryl Streep is still able to work,” but asked: “Why feed Hollywood’s living dead”?

De Niro later joined Trump as a Spy 100 “Worst People” honoree, bashed as a burnt-out thespian doing the same old schtick. His and Trump’s histories would stay weirdly intertwined. While Trump was thought of as an infamous hirer of scab construction labor, and garnered headlines as president when his administration tried to ban the unions’ famed inflatable rat, Scabby, De Niro soon after joined the same club. A $600 million deal to build the gargantuan Wildflower film studio in Astoria earned a visit by Scabby on De Niro’s 79th birthday in 2022 when he, too, chose non-union labor.

Today in downtown New York Trump and De Niro collided again, in a scene that will someday get its own wing in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Assholes Museum: