Robert De Niro's Tony Awards "F*ck Trump" outburst was "brief, profane and pointless"

The Atlantic

As Samantha Bee recently learned, uttering profanity against the Trump administration isn't very effect, according to Sophie Gilbert. "A brief outburst was apparently as far as his onstage protest was willing to go," she says of De Niro's outburst. "In that, the moment was of a piece with the bulk of the other statements made on the Tony stage, and with Kelly Clarkson’s vague call for 'action' on mass shootings at last month’s Billboard Music Awards, and with the Oscars in March, where President Trump’s name was barely mentioned at all. De Niro’s exclamation was easy—cathartic in its plosive syllables and its matching, guttural vowel sounds, and employing a profanity that postures itself as daring, subversive. It might have been a satisfying moment for De Niro and for his audience, but it was toothless otherwise." She adds: "It’s easy to take a platform that offers easy (if bleeped-out) access to millions of people and use profanity to capture a mood, to express an emotion. But the outrage that will doubtless ensue is a distraction from what really matters, and what’s much harder to realize: the work of trying to change a situation, not just rage against it."