MAKING IT PLAIN

Oscar Winner Hits Trump With Blistering 3-Word Warning

The Hollywood legend goes after the president in a new video.

Robert De Niro has a message for Donald Trump and the “thugs who are messing with our votes.”

The Hollywood icon, 83, created a video urging people to stand up for voters’ rights. “Voting should be easy,” he says in the video. “You get to decide. That’s your right, that’s your superpower, but there’s a catch. There are some powerful people who want to take away that power. This is Robert De Niro, and I’ve got a message for them,” he adds. “No f---ing way.”

The Godfather star, a longtime vocal opponent of Trump, also says, “If you want to elect politicians to prop up a would-be king who gets us into a disastrous war and corruptly profits from it, you can find them. Or, if you prefer candidates who won’t cut your healthcare and won’t protect pedophiles, there are great choices there, too.” Either way, he says, “Vote.”

And anyone “as furious as I am at all these thugs who are messing with our votes” should get involved with Hands Off Our Vote, an organization fighting to protect voters’ rights, he says.

“This administration wants to keep us from voting so they can control our elections and seize more authoritarian power,” the Hands Off Our Vote website reads. “They’re doing everything they can to make us feel isolated and powerless. We refuse to accept this. We will decide our future, choose our leaders, and ensure the will of the people prevails.”

Ahead of November’s critical midterm elections, the Trump administration has launched a campaign to stifle what it claims are noncitizen voters. His administration has dangled the specter of criminal prosecution above local officials who refuse to remove alleged noncitizens from voter rolls.

The Department of Justice sued California on Oct. 15, filing a lawsuit in federal court asking that state officials be barred from “tabulating vote by mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the upcoming federal election until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined.” The federal government had presented state election officials with a list of 20,000 alleged noncitizens to remove from California’s voter roll just two days earlier.

Intimidating local leaders into compliance is “unusual” in American elections, election law expert Rick Hansen told NPR. The practice has led to states and localities “seeing the federal government as kind of an adversary,” he said, adding that the National Voter Registration Act bars states from enacting “these last-minute voter purges” because it could disenfranchise eligible voters.

The DOJ admitted their list might remove valid voters but didn’t change its demands.

“We’re getting into the period of in-person early voting—that in this period that the federal government would send on a thumb drive, with the password on a sticky note, the names of 20,000 possible noncitizen voters and ask 48 hours for the state to agree to go through this list and purge voters. I mean, it’s just incredible,” Hansen said. “It’s not the kind of thing that ever has happened, that I’m aware of.”

De Niro tells viewers to join the “fight” in his video. “We’re fighting them in the courts and standing up to them in the streets,” he says. “And here’s something else you can do: vote early—whether by mail or in person—you control when. And then, no matter what they pull on Election Day, your vote will already be banked.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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