Anti-Trump speech cut at Gotham Awards

Robert De Niro appeared flustered Monday night after realizing his speech at the Gotham Awards had been edited — to cut blistering remarks he wrote about former President Donald Trump.

“I’m going to go back. I’m sorry. Okay, there was a mistake in this. I’ll keep going. Just keep scrolling,” De Niro, 80, said while introducing the Gotham Historical Icon and Creator Tribute award on behalf of his new film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

“I just want to say one thing,” the actor continued. “The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out and I didn’t know about it. And I want to read it. History isn’t history anymore. Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts, and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness.”

De Niro, who has been a very outspoken critic of the Republican party and Trump, claimed that in Florida, “young students are taught that slaves developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit.”

The Oscar-winning actor also took aim at the film industry itself, claiming that they were not immune “to this festering disease.”

 “The Duke, John Wayne, famously said of Native Americans, ‘I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves,’” De Niro continued in his speech.

It was then that “The Goodfellas” star took aim at Trump.

“Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, he said. “And he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution. But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul.”

“He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows disrespect, for example, by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a slur,” the “Taxi Driver” star continued. “Filmmakers, on the other hand, strive — this is where I came in and I saw that they edited all that.”

According to De Niro, the speech was supposed to pick up with him thanking Gotham and Apple, who helped distribute the film. However, he didn’t “feel like thanking them at all for what they did” with his speech.

“How dare they do that, actually,” he concluded.

The Post reached out to Apple and De Niro for further comment.

De Niro is no stranger to criticizing the former president at a star-studded event.

During the 2020 Screen Actors Guild Awards, the star lambasted Trump, 77, for his “abuse of power.”

“There’s right and there’s wrong. And there’s common sense and there’s abuse of power,” De Niro said at the time. “And as a citizen, I have as much right as anybody — an actor, an athlete, a musician, anybody else — to voice my opinion. And if I have a bigger voice because of my situation, I’m going to use it whenever I see a blatant abuse of power. And that’s all I’m gonna say about that tonight.”

In 2019, the actor also told Michael Moore that he wanted to throw a bag of s—t at the former president.

“It would kind of feel good to punch him — not hurt him — but just punch him in the face,” Moore said during their exchange.

“I’d like to see a bag of s – – t right in his face. Hit him right in his face,” De Niro responded before making a smacking sound with his hands. “And let the picture go all over the world. And that would be the most humiliating thing. Because he needs to be humiliated.”