Robert De Niro Sees Parallels Between ‘Wag the Dog’ and Donald Trump

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 sees it, ‘These people are no good.’ That hopefully will be the election itself. […] It’s very simple: The truth is the truth, and a non-truth is a non-truth. What are alternative facts? It’s either the truth or it is not the truth. But the truth in fiction, there is a certain type of truth and that has to be there. In something that is presented, it has to have a message that people can identify with, ‘This is the truth as I know it.’ What is going on with the whole scene with Trump and all that, he has destroyed the truth and made it OK to just outright lie about everything, where the lie becomes […] the truth. It’s just crazy. But we’ll get back.”

De Niro also credited “heroes who stand up for the country and not a party.”

And that truth that De Niro seeks in U.S. politics is instead found at least onscreen in his upcoming Netflix political thriller series “Zero Day.” The show is billed by the streamer as a “ripped-from-reality” thriller that “asks the question on everyone’s mind — how do we find truth in a world in crisis, one seemingly being torn apart by forces outside our control? And in an era rife with conspiracy theory and subterfuge, how much of those forces are products of our own doing, perhaps even of our own imagining?”

While the premise is under wraps, De Niro did detail how working on the series differed from his illustrious film career.

“The great thing is there are so many people working, actors, technicians, in all departments of film. That’s the great thing. When I was a young actor, you had a couple of independent films around plus the big A films, if you will, but those you couldn’t really get into,” De Niro said. “Doing a limited series is different. It’s a much longer commitment of time, five or six months, and it’s another rhythm. Doing a limited series is like doing three feature films in a row.”

“Mad Men” and “The Leftovers” veteran Lesli Linka Glatter directs all six episodes of “Zero Day,” which is co-created by Eric Newman (“Narcos”), Noah Oppenheim (“The Thing About Pam”), and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael S. Schmidt.

De Niro said he was thankful to not have “six different directors who have different ideas or different ways of working, so they have to be guided into the thrust of the core of the show,” as on other series, since Glatter was the sole filmmaker. De Niro added that collaborating with just one director “makes it simpler.”

However, a show like “Zero Day” didn’t have much room for improvisation.

“A movie, there is something more than you can do than with a [series]. But I have limited experience with limited series,” De Niro said. “I like to be more expressive and ad-lib and you can do it in those, but in this case, there was so much information we had to get out [with exposition]. It’s not about behavior, it’s about explaining what’s going on so the audience knows what’s going on. You have to blend that exposition with behavior, so it becomes more challenging.”

De Niro also hinted at another film in the works with an unnamed writer/director duo.

“Good scripts are around. [But] they’re few and far between,” he said of new projects. “I have a script that I like by a director/writer team that I am in fact going to have a reading of. I do that a lot: I have a table reading with a bunch of actors who volunteer just to do it, just to help you out and lift it off the page. I picked people I like a lot. We’ll see where that goes.”

Read more about the 2024 Tribeca Festival Lisboa here.