Robert De Niro sees some of Donald Trump’s rhetoric in his classic political satire “ Wag the Dog .” The actor and filmmaker said during the opening panel for the inaugural Tribeca Festival Lisboa , as moderated by the CEO of Grupo Impresa Francisco Pedro Balsemão, that the 1997 film has an eerie relation to former president Trump. De Niro starred as a spin doctor who masterminds a hoax along with a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) to stage a fictional war in Albania as an effort to draw attention away from a presidential sex scandal.
William H. Macy, Denis Leary, Willie Nelson, Craig T. Nelson, and the late Anne Heche also appeared in the film, which was shot at the White House under the Clinton administration .
During the 2024 Tribeca Festival Lisboa, De Niro’s festival co-founder and CEO of Tribeca Enterprises Jane Rosenthal asked him onstage about playing a “spin-mister” in “Wag the Dog” and how that relates to modern politics. “That’s another form of bending reality,” De Niro said. “My character tells Dustin’s character, ‘Deny, deny, deny.
’ And that’s what Trump does. He learned it, or he knew it already, and he had another person, Roy Cohn, during a terrible period in American history. It’s the same type of thing we are going through now [as during McCarthyism].
” De Niro, who is famously anti-Trump, added, “I hope that some day soon that that will happen in our country, there is one moment that finally defines it and everyone s.