Robert De Niro Stood on a Stage and Said He Can’t Love a Country Led by Donald Trump.

On the night of Sunday, June 14, 2026 — Flag Day, and Donald Trump’s 80th birthday — Robert De Nirotook the stage at the Town Hall in New York City for “Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment,” a celebrity event organized as live counter-programming to the UFC card Trump was hosting on the White House South Lawn that same evening. De Niro opened by welcoming “all of you who couldn’t get tickets to the White House cage fights” — and then delivered the line that led the coverage.

“I can’t love a country that’s led by a racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant,” the 82-year-old actor told the crowd. “And let me just say it, I can’t love the country that’s led by Donald Trump. And a sycophant Congress.” He compared loving America under Trump to “an abused spouse saying they love their abuser.”

It was not a new posture for De Niro, who has spent the better part of a decade making Trump the recurring villain of his award-show speeches. What made June 14 notable was the staging: a black-tie chorus of Hollywood and Broadway names — Jane Fonda, Bette Midler, Patti Smith, Julia Roberts — assembled to sing about the First Amendment a few hundred miles from where the President was watching cage fights on his lawn. This page documents what De Niro said, who stood with him, and how the night actually went.

• June 14, 2026 — the night of the 'Rise Up, Sing Out' concert at the Town Hall, NYC — staged opposite Trump's White House UFC event · Source: Hollywood Reporter; Mediaite
• 82 — De Niro's age; he has attacked Trump from award-show stages since at least the 2018 Tony Awards
• 550+ — entertainment-industry signatories to Jane Fonda's revived Committee for the First Amendment, which produced the concert · Source: Hollywood Reporter
• Same night — Trump hosted UFC Freedom 250 on the White House South Lawn for his 80th birthday — the event the concert was counter-programming · Source: CBS News
• 8 years — of De Niro anti-Trump speeches on record — Tonys 2018, Gotham 2023, the Manhattan trial 2024, Cannes 2025, No Kings 2026

“Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment” was a roughly 90-minute event at the Town Hall, produced by the Committee for the First Amendment— a 1947 McCarthy-era artists’ group that Jane Fondapublicly revived in October 2025 with more than 550 entertainment-industry signatories. It was livestreamed for free, promoted alongside the “No Kings” protest movement, and explicitly timed against Trump’s UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House lawn. The billed performers and speakers included Fonda, De Niro, Bette Midler, Patti Smith, Rufus Wainwright, Julia Roberts, Joy Reid, Lily Gladstone, Tessa Thompson, and the children’s entertainer “Ms. Rachel.”

The premise, organizers said, was a defense of free expression. The framing — A-list celebrities at a NYC theater, singing, while a sitting president threw a birthday party of cage fights — gave conservative media an easy contrast to run with, and they ran with it.

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De Niro’s remarks, as carried by Mediaite and The Daily Beast, built to the headline line through a list of grievances:

“Our country isn't so lovable right now… loving our country is starting to sound like an abused spouse saying they love their abuser. I can't love a country that's led by a racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant. And let me just say it, I can't love the country that's led by Donald Trump. And a sycophant Congress.”

Robert De Niro · Rise Up, Sing Out concert · The Town Hall, New York City · June 14, 2026

He closed on a softer note — “For most of my life, of course, I did love this country… I want to love my country again. I want my country back” — and led the audience in a call-and-response chant directed at Trump quotes about inflation and the economy. The chant’s refrain, a callback to his 1988 film Midnight Run, is not printable in full here.

The split-screen was the point. While De Niro and the chorus performed in Manhattan, Trump sat cage-side between the First Lady and UFC chief Dana White for UFC Freedom 250, the first UFC card ever staged on the White House South Lawn, built around his 80th birthday and the country’s 250th anniversary. The two events became a tidy stand-in for the broader cultural divide — and the same night produced its own viral controversy when a fighter closed his post-fight interview with a slur aimed at Michelle Obama.

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De Niro had the headline quote, but he was not alone on the bill. The Twitchy framing — “Replace Your Bettes” — singled out Bette Midler, the 80-year-old singer whose anti-Trump musical bits have become a genre of their own. In October 2025, Midler serenaded Stephen Colbert with a “Wind Beneath My Wings” parody whose lyrics included the line that he “never kissed the orange a—.” Julia Roberts, per Breitbart’s recap, led the room in “inhaling and exhaling, we will prevail.” Fonda, the organizer, delivered the keynote.

The collective vocal performance is what conservative accounts seized on — clips of the ensemble singing drew mockery across X, with one widely shared post describing it as “like 40 people singing terribly, to a terrible song.”

The June 14 speech did not come out of nowhere. De Niro has made Trump a fixture of his public appearances for eight years:

At the 2018 Tony Awards, he drew a standing ovation with an expletive aimed at Trump that CBS censored on its broadcast delay. At the 2023 Gotham Awards, he read anti-Trump remarks that had been edited out of his teleprompter. Outside Trump’s 2024 Manhattan hush-money trial, he warned that Trump “could destroy the world.” At Cannes in 2025, he used an honorary Palme d’Or acceptance to call Trump a “philistine.” At a No Kings rally in March 2026, he said Trump “must be stopped, and he must be stopped now.” Trump, for his part, has called De Niro “a sick, demented person,” “low IQ,” and a “total loser.”

There is a recurring feature of celebrity Trump commentary, and De Niro’s speech is a clean example of it: the rhetoric reaches for the maximum available frame. America under an elected president becomes a battered spouse; a political opponent becomes a “tyrant” running a country that can no longer be loved. The 2026 election that produced that president was, by every official count, free and fair. De Niro is entitled to his disgust. Whether “I can’t love my country” persuades anyone who isn’t already in the room is a separate question — and one the concert’s own framing seemed designed to avoid asking.

Trump spent the evening doing the opposite of engaging the critique. He threw the fights, posted his satisfaction, and let the contrast do the work.

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Last updated June 15, 2026