When your opponents run out of real ammunition, they resort to making stuff up. That has been the defining playbook of the anti-Trump. “He’s a racist!” “He’s a pedophile!” “He’s acting like a dictator!” You name it, they've thrown it. It’s not coming from a place of strength; it’s coming from a place of desperation.
And they’re still desperate.
In fact, Robert De Niro is dusting off one of the greatest hits.
De Niro appeared in a preview clip for an upcoming episode of The Best People with Nicolle Wallace, an MS NOW podcast that drops Monday, in which he predicted that Donald Trump won’t leave office voluntarily.
"He will never leave," De Niro declared. "We have to make him leave. He jokes now about nationalizing the elections. He's not joking. We've seen enough already." He went even further. "Let's not kid ourselves. He will not leave. It's up to us to get rid of him."
This is not a new tune from De Niro. He was singing it before the 2024 election, screaming it in October 2025, and now he's back at it in 2026, just after the Epstein files smear backfired on the Democrats.
It’s not really a question of whether he actually believes it. I don’t think he, or anyone else who makes such claims, truly believes it; they’ve just given up on making a coherent policy argument and have to resort to fear tactics.
But here's the thing about the "Trump won't leave office" conspiracy theory: if Trump were ever going to refuse to leave the White House, the moment would have been January 2021, after a bitterly disputed election rife with problems. He didn't. He left. The transfer of power happened. Whatever you think about January 6, Donald Trump is not currently in the White House because he refused to go — he's there because 77 million Americans voted him back in.
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Yes, Trump has teased the idea of a third term. Heck, so did Barack Obama. But the 22nd Amendment is a thing, and Trump himself has acknowledged that the Constitution bars him from running again, telling reporters that it's "pretty clear" he cannot serve a third term.
None of that slowed De Niro down for even a second.
Wallace, for her part, made things worse. Rather than pushing back on the hysteria, she raised her own panic flag — questioning whether Trump would even respect the results of the 2026 midterm elections. As if the sitting president has some magic lever to pull that would let him personally reject the outcome of the midterm election results. De Niro took the cue and ran with it, warning that Trump would try to disrupt the midterms and that it falls on ordinary Americans to "make sure that all the polling places have people that can come there safely." Wallace tried to steer him toward "peaceful," but De Niro didn't exactly embrace the redirect.
This is what the radical left has been reduced to. It cannot win an argument on the economy, immigration, energy, or national security, etc., etc. So instead of debating policy, leftists traffic in fear, pushing the same authoritarian apocalypse that they’ve been shouting for years.
And they have been wrong every single time.
