Robert De Niro walked onstage at a First Amendment benefit concert in New York on Sunday night, quoted Donald Trump saying he doesn't think about Americans' financial situation 'not even a little bit,' and then told him to shut the fuck up. The crowd chanted it back. Several thousand times, apparently, because they needed to.
Welcome to the Other Show
The timing was not an accident. While the White House was hosting a UFC match on Sunday night, Manhattan's Town Hall was packed with people who had a somewhat different idea of what free speech looks like in America. The Guardian reports that the Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment ran for two and a half hours and was co-executive produced by Jane Fonda, whose father Henry was an original member of the Committee for the First Amendment back in 1947.
De Niro opened with a joke about the UFC: "Good evening, everyone, and welcome to all of you who couldn't get tickets to the White House cage fights." It landed. Of course it landed. The man has been doing this for fifty years and he is not getting softer about it.
Fonda revived the Committee for the First Amendment in 2025 specifically because of Trump's second term. The committee was originally formed to defend the Hollywood Ten, the screenwriters who got blacklisted for alleged communist sympathies during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Fonda's position, stated plainly on Sunday, is that the un-American activities committee is now operating out of a different address. "I think the un-American Activities Committee right now is coming from the White House," she said.
De Niro Is Not Interested in Being Diplomatic
Here is what Robert De Niro actually said, per The Guardian's reporting, and you should read it in full because paraphrasing it doesn't do it justice. "I don't love a country that's led by a racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant." He compared people who say they love America under Trump to an abuse victim declaring love for their abuser. Then he quoted Trump's own words about not thinking about Americans' financial situation even a little bit, and told him to shut the fuck up.
The crowd turned those four words into a chant. Which is either cathartic political theater or a genuinely alarming sign of where the national mood is, depending on your read. Probably both.
De Niro was coming off the final day of the 25th annual Tribeca Film Festival earlier that same day, so he had already been doing public-facing work for hours before stepping onstage and saying the quiet part very, very loudly into a microphone. The man does not take days off.
Bette Midler Updated Woody Guthrie and Did Not Soften the Message
Bette Midler performed Woody Guthrie's 1944 protest song All You Fascists Bound to Lose, except she rewrote it. The Guardian reports the new lyrics included the line "We're gonna win the midterms, we're coming for his ass." In front of a live audience, after which she told them she had never in her long career lived through anything like what is happening right now.
"I've been around a long time, but I've never been through what we're living through now," Midler said. She is 80 years old. She has seen things. The fact that she is standing on a stage in Manhattan singing rewritten anti-fascist folk songs with updated midterm election threats in the lyrics is the kind of detail that should probably make people sit with their feelings for a moment.
Rufus Wainwright sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Patti Smith brought the crowd to its feet with People Have the Power, her 1988 protest anthem. The Guardian notes the event was also streamed live, with Fonda pointing to hundreds of thousands of viewers watching from watch parties and rented-out theaters around the country.
The Night Went Beyond the Celebrity Speeches
Look, it would be easy to write this off as a Hollywood awards-show stand-in, famous people saying famous-people things about politics. But the Guardian's reporting makes clear that the event went considerably further than that.
Julia Roberts read a poem from Amanda Gorman in honor of Renée Good, the 37-year-old queer American woman who was shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis earlier this year. Roberts made the point directly: "Renée Nicole Good was not a symbol. She was an American woman, a queer woman, who was doing the very best she could do to be good in an unjust world."
Lily Gladstone, who grew up on a Blackfeet Reservation, addressed the audience about the Native American experience and offered a corrective to the idea that what's happening now is somehow without precedent. "For many Americans, this era of division, of stolen speech, broken promises, families torn apart...may feel unprecedented," she said. "For the first peoples of this land, unfortunately, this has been ongoing since the birth of this country as we know it today." Formerly detained children also appeared onstage and led the audience in song. RuPaul's Drag Race star Peppermint spoke about trans children being "intimidated by a government that cares more about censoring their bodies than feeding them." A rabbi, a pastor, and an imam appeared together and spoke about religious freedom.
What Fonda Is Actually Asking People to Do
Jane Fonda closed the night by listing action items for the audience, including calling representatives. The Guardian's report cuts off before the full list, but the thrust is clear: the event was not designed to be a venting session with good music, even if it functioned as one. The Committee for the First Amendment is treating this as an organizing tool.
Fonda's argument, laid out over the course of the evening, is that the current assault on free speech is qualitatively different from anything in recent memory. "What is really different from the last century is that the attacks are coming from every part of the government: the executive, the legislative and the supreme court," she said. That is not the rhetoric of someone who thinks this is normal political cycling. That is someone who thinks the infrastructure of dissent itself is under siege.
The event was held at Town Hall, a venue chosen specifically for its history with the suffragette movement. The choice of venue is doing a lot of narrative work and Fonda knows it.
The Dingo Take
Here is the thing about a bunch of famous people holding a concert to protest Donald Trump: the right will spend this week dismissing it as out-of-touch celebrities who don't know real America, and the left will spend this week sharing clips on social media, and somewhere in the middle of all of that is a 37-year-old woman named Renée Good who was killed by ICE and whose name got read aloud by Julia Roberts in front of thousands of people because that was the only way she was going to get anything close to a national moment of attention. That is the actual story underneath the celebrity packaging.
De Niro quoting Trump's own words back at him is effective precisely because the words are so nakedly bad. "I don't think about Americans' financial situation, not even a little bit" is a direct quote from the sitting president of the United States. You don't need a celebrity to dress it up. You just need to say it out loud in a room full of people and watch their faces.
Midler rewrote Woody Guthrie. De Niro got a crowd chanting. Fonda rebuilt her father's civil liberties organization from the ground up because she felt she had no other choice. Whether any of it moves the needle politically is genuinely unknown. But the midterms are coming, and a woman who has been doing activism since before most of the current administration was born just sang "we're coming for his ass" to a sold-out crowd in Manhattan. File that wherever you think it belongs.
