In early March 2025, shortly after the American Film Academy Awards ceremony, a video of a Hollywood actor swearing at the current US President went viral on the Internet. We have verified the authenticity of the video.
97th Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards passed in Los Angeles on the night of March 2-3, 2025. A few hours later, posts with a short video began to appear on RuNet, allegedly capturing the speech of the 81-year-old actor at this event. “Robert De Niro’s speech at the Oscars was short but succinct: “I’ll say one thing: fuck Trump! And “Down with Trump” doesn’t work anymore. Just fuck him!”, says a tweet from user X under the nickname Slava J (400,000 views at the time of writing this analysis). Similar posts can be found on Telegram (examples here, here, here, here And here), as well as on the pages of users and public pages on VKontakte (here, here And here). Similar publications got infected and in the Ukrainian-language segment of the Network, as well as in English (and among both supporters the current President of the United States and opponents).
Robert De Niro is a longtime critic of Donald Trump. Since 2016, when the politician was first elected President of the United States, the artist called him “completely crazy", "an idiot, a national disaster, a disgrace to the country" and simply "evil"and also stated about wanting to hit him in the face and spokethat he didn’t care about the people who died during the coronavirus pandemic. One of the biggest scandals happened in November 2023. Then, during his speech at the Gotham Awards, De Niro stated, that the beginning of his teleprompter speech was edited because all the actor’s anti-Trump statements were cut out from there. He said that he did not know about this, so he read out the deleted fragments from his smartphone.
“History is no longer history. The truth is not the truth, and even facts are replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness,” De Niro began his speech. At the end he said: “Lies have become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office (De Niro appears to be referring to calculations fact checkers from The Washington Post. — Approx. Ed.), and he is not slowing down in his current campaign of retribution. But with all his lies, he cannot hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys nature's gifts and shows his disrespect - e.g. using the word 'Pocahontas' as an insult."
Soon Trump published expanded answer to the artist on his social network Truth Social:
“Robert De Niro, whose acting talents have greatly diminished and his reputation is now under attack, is even forced to use a teleprompter to make obscene and disgusting statements that are so disrespectful to our country. It is unwatchable, neither in the cinema nor in the company of the fools who destroyed the Oscar ceremony, turning it from one of the best shows in the country into a low-rated hack. De Niro should focus on his own life, which is already a mess, rather than on other people's lives. He has become a complete loser, and the world is watching, waiting and laughing!”
However, the video that recently went viral is neither about the Oscars nor about 2025. Behind De Niro on the set you can see the title Tony Awards is an American prize awarded annually for achievements on the theatrical stage. Consequently, Internet users at least confused the ceremonies.
About how De Niro sent Trump off the stage and received a standing ovation from the audience, the largest English-language media wrote back in June 2018, that is, during the first term of the current US President. It was then in New York and passed 72nd Tony Awards. It was reported, that after his big announcement, De Niro, as planned, introduced a performance by singer Bruce Springsteen. According to media reports, although the show was broadcast live, CBS managed to blare out obscenities for viewers believed to number about 6 million.
So the viral video is genuine, but it was recorded in 2018, not 2025, and during the Tony Awards, not the Oscars. Posts with an incorrect video caption appear to have initially appeared in the English-language segment of the social network X, but then spread among foreign-language users.
Cover photo: screenshot @guardiannews (YouTube) / CBS / Tony Award Productions
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