It was, by all accounts, a public demolition. This wasn’t a polite cable news debate where panelists trade scripted barbs; it was a verbal mugging, a “full-blown public demolition.” In one corner stood Robert De Niro, the two-time Oscar winner, the cinematic icon of tough-guy cool, the man who embodied Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta. In the other corner sat Greg Gutfeld, the smirking king of late-night, armed not with a script but with a “wrecking ball of pure wit.”

What followed was a systematic, and reportedly brutal, dismantling of a Hollywood legend, turning decades of carefully crafted prestige into the punchline of a “savage roast.” Gutfeld didn’t just respond to De Niro’s recent string of angry political tirades; he “absolutely obliterated him,” exposing the “hollow thunder” behind the actor’s furious snarls.

The incident that sparked the inferno was De Niro’s latest media appearance, another “over-the-top performance” that felt, as one critic noted, “less like truthtelling and more like a desperate Oscar audition gone wrong.” De Niro, appearing on “The View,” raged “like a bull who saw a red MAGA hat,” becoming so incensed that the show’s audio allegedly had to be cut. His message was one of apocalyptic fear, warning that a Trump return to office would mean “this kind of government will perish from the earth” and that citizens could “kiss these freedoms goodbye.”

But where De Niro offered sputtering emotion, Gutfeld returned fire with “surgical precision.” His central thesis was devastatingly simple: take away the script, and the brilliant actor is revealed as an “intellectually deprived,” “coke adult simpleton.”

“Isn’t that amazing?” Gutfeld mused to his panel. “I used to think wow, that guy’s brilliant. But once you take the words away from him, he is so stupid.”

Gutfeld and his panel weren’t just attacking; they were dissecting. They painted a picture of De Niro as an “elderly confused man,” babbling on the street, who was found by “a band of self-satisfied elitists” who “threw some pants on him” and “gave him a stage.”

The takedown was relentless, blending humor with brutal analysis. Gutfeld mocked De Niro’s performative anger, particularly his “clenched fists,” which he joked “looked like he was pressing a 2-lb weight in a Jenny Craig commercial.” The roast zeroed in on the idea that De Niro is no longer an actor but a “parody of himself,” a “loud Yelp review in a suit.”

Beyond the personal insults, Gutfeld built a case for De Niro’s profound lack of self-awareness. He argued that the actor, like many Hollywood elites, is trapped in a bubble, surrounded only by people who tell him he’s “wonderful” or want to sell him something. “He has no clue what he’s doing,” Gutfeld stated, adding that De Niro’s anger isn’t practical or intellectual, but purely “emotional.”

Perhaps the sharpest knife in Gutfeld’s attack was the accusation of “glossy hypocrisy.” The panel reveled in the irony of De Niro, the man who built a career “glorifying gangsters, hitmen, and maniacs,” now clutching his pearls and appointing himself the “moral compass of the red carpet elite.” How, Gutfeld asked, can the man who starred in “Dirty Grandpa” lecture anyone on decency?

This hypocrisy, Gutfeld argued, was most evident in De Niro’s own words. On “The View,” De Niro was asked if Donald Trump was “worse” than the “unredeemable characters” he’s played, including the psychopathic Travis Bickle and the wife-beating Jake LaMotta. De Niro’s answer was chilling in its earnestness: “To me, he is.”

Gutfeld pounced on this, highlighting a phenomenon he’s often discussed: “how accusations of Trump’s nutty behavior always ends up with the accusers acting nuttier.” De Niro, in his quest to label his political foes as “crazy,” had, in Gutfeld’s view, “gone crazier,” resorting to sputtering “f-bombs” because his “resistance had run out of script.”

The segment also dismantled the media’s portrayal of De Niro as some kind of brave truth-teller. Gutfeld scoffed at this notion, painting De Niro’s rants as “political karaoke with a side of self-righteous tantrums.” True courage, he implied, isn’t “shouting political slogans in a tux” while surrounded by a cheering, like-minded audience. It isn’t “yelling at a teleprompter while wearing $4,000 designer shoes.” That, Gutfeld insisted, isn’t bravery; it’s a “circus.”

The “King of Cool-Down” wasn’t finished. He portrayed De Niro as a man who “wants to matter” but is “bitter because deep down he knows the spotlight has faded.” The core of De Niro’s rage, Gutfeld concluded, isn’t really about politics or saving democracy. He is “angry because people stop pretending his opinion matters.”

This, in the end, was the final, fatal blow. Gutfeld’s takedown successfully reframed De Niro not as a political threat or a moral leader, but as a cultural relic. He’s “the voicemail you skip, the commercial you mute, the grandpa at dinner repeating the same story.” He’s an actor who “peaked in the ’90s” and is now desperately “begging for applause.”

The narrative presented was one of a complete role-reversal. De Niro, the man who once defined cinematic cool, had become the sputtering, emotional, confused old man. Gutfeld, the man often dismissed by mainstream critics, had become the voice of “cold, hard reality.”

De Niro, the man famous for “Good Fellas,” was left speechless, exposed as a performer who is lost without his lines. Gutfeld’s “savage roast” concluded with the assessment that this wasn’t just a political disagreement. It was a cultural unmasking. De Niro, the actor, “confused loudness with wisdom, anger with intellect, and fame with the right to go unchallenged.” Greg Gutfeld, the new media star, was simply the one who finally called “cut.”