‘A coward’s violence’: Robert De Niro trolls Trump outside hush-money trial

It was a scenario that Donald Trump, in his pre-presidential celebrity days, might have relished; as he sat inside a Manhattan courtroom, Robert De Niro was waiting outside.

But this was politics and De Niro, the pugnacious star of myriad Hollywood gangster films, was there not to pay homage to the former president as a fellow VIP, but to diss him in terms that might have been in place in Goodfellas or Mean Streets.

The 80-year-old Oscar winner was present outside the New York courthouse where Trump’s hush-money trial was reaching its closing stages on Tuesday as an operative of Joe Biden’s re-election bid, deployed as a proxy while the president’s campaign made its first clear foray into his opponent’s complex legal woes.

Introduced by the Biden campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, De Niro – a vitriolic critic of Trump, who has provided the voiceover for a new 30-second advertisement warning of the perils of his return – adapted to the role with professional aplomb.

“This is my neighbourhood, downtown New York City. I grew up here and feel at home in these streets,” he said, before remarking on the strangeness of Trump being in a courtroom across the street, “because he doesn’t belong in my city”.

The former president and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee had been tolerated in the Big Apple, said the actor, when he was “just another grubby real estate hustler masquerading as a big shot”.

But now the stakes had been raised and Trump, De Niro explained, had a vision of dictatorial power that had prompted him to step into the political arena, citing the mob violence from Trump’s supporters that accompanied the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

“That’s why I needed to be involved … in the new