For Jimmy Kimmel’s comeback show on ABC Tuesday night, Hollywood legend Robert De Niro joined the late-night host to offer a brutal parody of what some political commentators have long identified as Donald Trump’s “gangster” style of being president.
Following Kimmel’s opening monologue, a forceful, sometimes wry but mostly sober and emotional defense of free speech, he did a sketch with De Niro, a vocal critic of Trump who channeled some of his “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman” experience to play what appeared to be an mob-underboss-style chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
De Niro’s tough-talking character was supposed to be FCC Chair Brendan Carr, though his character refused to give his name while saying he had been appointed by “Sir Trump,” who he used to “do some work for” in Atlantic City. The sketch opened with Kimmel interrupting the FCC chair as he was on the phone, issuing mafioso-style threats about The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg for daring to criticize his boss.
“You tell Whoopi over there she better show a bit of respect, or the only view she’ll be getting is from under the George Washington, the bridge, not the guy,” De Niro’s FCC chair said.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JUNE 05: Robert De Niro on stage during the “Tribeca Lisboa Reception” as part of the 2025 Tribeca Festival at Tribeca Film Center on June 05, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival)
This joke appeared to refer to comments from Goldberg and her “The View” co-hosts Monday about the Trump administration putting pressure on ABC to pull Kimmel’s show from the air over his joke last week about the disputed political ideology of Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer or right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Kimmel’s comment prompted Disney, ABC’s parent company, to suspend “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “indefinitely,” with the network immediately facing massive backlash from consumers, Hollywood stars and even some prominent right-wing figures for apparently bowing to pressure from Carr and the Trump administration.
After De Niro’s character talked about teaching Goldberg “a lesson about consequences,” he took offense when Kimmel claimed he was using “mob tactics” to suppress free speech.
“What the (expletive) did you just say to me?,” De Niro’s character asked. When Kimmel pointed out that he wasn’t allowed to swear or the FCC would fine the show, De Niro said “I am the (expletive) FCC. I can (expletive) say whatever the (expletive) I want. You? No.”
The premise of the sketch clearly comes from the argument, put forth by political commentators since Trump’s first administration, that the leadership style of the former New York City real estate developer is less “dictator” than “mob boss,” as Jonathan Alter wrote in an essay, “Extortionist-in-Chief,” for the Washington Monthly last month.
“The mob-style shakedowns of colleges, networks, law firms, and businesses are the through line of the Trump era,” according to the essay’s sub-heading. Alter described how Trump mused to reporters last month: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator.” To that, Alter said that “Al Capone and John Gotti” would “fit better than Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini” in how Trump wants to run the U.S. government.
For The Nation, author and journalist Jeet Heer noted that Trump’s 2024 campaign was endorsed by Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, a former hitman and underboss for Gotti’s Gambino crime family. Gravano made the case for Trump by saying, “I’m gonna call him a gangster. We need a gangster,” Heer said.
Heer said that Trump learned about mob-style tactics “up close thanks to his lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn, who was also an adviser to mob bosses like Paul Castellano and Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno.” As a real estate developer, Trump had repeated business dealings with mobsters, who long controlled aspects of the construction business in New York.
Trump also is “a repeat lawbreaker, who was convicted on multiple felonies by a New York court earlier this year and who had many ongoing legal investigations,” Heer pointed out. In describing Trump’s “government of gangsters” Heer said he “operates like a mob boss, surrounding himself with family members and groveling loyalists, prizing fealty above all else, and practicing a transactional politics of favors and deals that shows little regard for legal norms.”
In their politically charged sketch, Kimmel pushed back against the “threats and intimidation” that he said were coming from De Niro’s character. In response, De Niro said: “The chairman of the FCC gently suggesting that you gently shut the (expletive) up.’
Kimmel shot back, “But you can’t say that, it’s a violation of free speech.” But De Niro then advised him that free speech is no longer free.
“We’re charging by the word now,” De Niro said. “It depends on what you want to say. You want to say something nice about the president’s beautiful thick yellow hair, how he can do his makeup better than any broad, that’s free.”
“But if you want to do a joke like he’s so fat he needs two seats on the Epstein jet, that’s gonna cost you,” De Niro said, referring to the late financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Trump was friends with Epstein, though he said they had a falling out nearly two decades ago and that he never knew about his alleged sex trafficking of teenage girls. The Trump administration has been under fire for failing to make public U.S. Justice Department documents on Epstein’s illegal activities.
De Niro said that the price for such an Epstein joke would be “a couple of fingers, maybe a tooth, depends how constipated he is.” When De Niro said that the new FCC motto was “sticks and stones may break your bones,” he clarified to Kimmel that words “can harm you now.”
He added, “Just make sure you pick the right words. Capiche?” With that, the phone rang, De Niro picked it up and said “Hi, handsome” before more respectfully saying, “I mean, I’m sorry, Mr. President.”
When Kimmel asked, “What did he say,” De Niro replied, “I gotta go. Couple of cases of Tylenol fell off a truck and now I got to figure out how to put autism in them.”
The sketch ended with De Niro’s FCC chair issuing a final warning, “I’ll be watching you, Kimmie. Maybe not on ABC, that’s up to you.”