Robert De Niro slams Trump's response to COVID-19; compares him to 'crazy relative'

Robert De Niro believes that the coronavirus pandemic wouldn't have had such a drastic impact on the United States, which has registered over two million cases and over one lakh deaths till now if President Donald Trump had not responded to the situation like a "crazy relative."

During a virtual appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on Wednesday night, Robert De Niro ridiculed Donald Trump's response to the global pandemic and said his it is his failure to listen to health experts that enabled the virus to wreak havoc across the nation.

"This whole thing could have been avoided if Trump had listened to the people in the intelligence community. They kept telling him something was coming. What scares me is that people just were afraid to tell him the truth. If you tell him the truth then he's gonna get mad at you and he's gonna let you go, and then what?" the actor told host Jimmy Fallon.

The 76-year-old, who has always been an outspoken critic of Trump, compared the POTUS's reaction to health experts' suggestion to that of a "crazy relative."

"It's crazy. It's like telling a crazy relative. You avoid arguing with them because they're gonna go crazy – but they run the country! There's no choice. Your allegiance is to the country, not to him. There's the insanity of it all. The chaos is from when it started to where we are now. It might have been worse than we had hoped but never where we are now," "The Irishman" actor said.

"It's beyond absurd. It's theatre of the absurd. Stop it," the Oscar-winner said about the virus claiming over 115,000 lives in the country.

The actor also voiced his support to the anti-racism protests in the US following the death of African-American George Floyd in police custody in Minnesota and opened up about raising six bi-racial children in the country.

"My children are all half Black and I don't have, even me, I take certain things for granted," De Niro confessed about his privilege as a white person. De Niro has two children from his previous marriage to Diahnne Abbott- son Raphael and daughter Drena whom Abbott had from a previous relationship and was later adopted by the actor. He has twin sons, Julian and Aron, conceived by IVF and delivered by a surrogate mother in 1995, both of whom he shares with ex-girlfriend Toukie Smith. He shares two children- son Elliot and daughter Helen Grace with ex-wife Grace Hightower. Helen was also born via surrogacy.

"When people say that they tell their kids, 'Keep your hands [out] when you're stopped by any cops, keep your hands on the steering wheel, don't make a sudden move, don't put your hands below, don't do this,' you understand that. That's scary. That has to change," he said about the racism against the black community.

He also commented on the police brutality and said "anybody who hurts another person for no reason other than self-defense or the defense of other people around shouldn't be doing that job."