“ I haven’t seen so many losers since my last fight at Madison Square Garden.”

Scattered laughs from a strip-club audience greet Jake LaMotta’s opening line as the bloated former champion, portrayed by Robert De Niro in "Raging Bull," makes his standup comedy debut. Released in 1980, director Martin Scorsese’s black-and-white biopic earned De Niro the Academy Award for Best Actor. He turned in a career-defining triumph, one that encompassed both brilliant onscreen delivery and off-screen physical transformations to match LaMotta’s own. The film has consistently ranked at or near the top of all lists of the greatest movies ever made.

In his post-boxing spiral into violence and despair, however, Jake LaMotta hardly possessed the wit or intellect of a standup comedian. Rather, as "Raging Bull" depicts, when confronted by a heckler, the semi-literate ex-pug can offer only the lowest, most graceless and unimaginative retort, favored solely by those too stupid and crass to think of anything else: “F*** you.”

With his performance at the Tony Awards Sunday night, Robert De Niro, America’s most prominent Method actor, took that final step downward and became Jake LaMotta.

Twice, standing before Broadway’s leading lights, De Niro bluntly exhorted the president of the United States to perform upon himself what the late Tom Wolfe used to call “a quaint anatomical impossibility.”

And the Broadway Swells — stewards of the American stage tradition, inheritors of Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim — gave a standing ovation.

The moment marked another sad milestone on the long road to omnipresent public obscenity. How far we’ve come since it was considered scandalous when, in 1969, Jacqueline Onassis was photographed emerging from a Manhattan screening of the pornographic film "I Am Curious Yellow." But De Niro’s outburst was troubling for still other reasons.

Beyond those offended by the prevalence of obscenity, those most dispirited by this year’s Tony Awards should be the serious De Niro fans who, like this author, were raised on the great man’s canon, memorized all the lines, famous and obscure, from "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver" and "The King of Comedy," and even enjoyed some of the latter-day comedic work. Here was a major artist of our time, an actor renowned for his range, subtlety, and sensitivity in the divination of so many human conditions, unconsciously becoming his basest, most savage creation.

De Niro turns seventy-five in August. Raging bull, indeed.

* * *

“It’s no longer ‘Down with Trump,’” the actor explained amid ecstatic cheering, “it’s ‘f*** Trump!’” This suggests that somewhere along the line, the actor’s view of the boundaries for appropriate protest against the president changed; for some unspecified reason, a formulation as civil and unmistakable in meaning as “Down with Trump” no longer sufficed. The audience evidently agreed.

So what was the intervening event? Why do De Niro and his colleagues now consider his action, one of the most extreme utterances of public profanity against a president ever committed, the only suitable course? Were they signaling to the political movement to which they all belong, the American left, that acceptable language has not stopped De Niro’s fellow New Yorker from advancing his America First agenda in the Oval Office and that extraordinary measures are now required?

Does the moment signify a surrender, of sorts? Can the desperation of a man’s enemies, tactical and linguistic, be considered a reliable measure of his success in battling them? After all, does not deployment of “f*** you” in any argument, even more swiftly than the invocation of Hitler or the Third Reich, convey that the speaker has lost that particular argument?

Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign posted his own milestones on the march toward omnipresent public obscenity. He was the first winning presidential candidate anyone can remember who casually dropped curse words, albeit some of the milder ones, into stump speeches; and at one of the primary debates, he averred to his anatomy in a way that also seemed unprecedented.

Does one side or the other in our political discourse enjoy a lock on such behavior? Recent events in the media sphere suggest that while the conduct is not unique to one side, the consequences for demonstrations of offensive public speech can indeed differ depending on one’s political orientation. Trump supporter Roseanne Barr uttered no expletives in her infamous tweet attacking former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, but Barr’s communication was unmistakably racist, and therefore socially obscene, and ABC justifiably canceled Barr’s sitcom. We should remember, too, that CNN fired comedienne Kathy Griffin from her New Year’s Eve hosting duties after she posed with a bloodied head resembling that of Trump.

Still, the De Niro descent occurred shortly after another related episode. Liberal comedienne Samantha Bee, host of the satirical program "Full Frontal" on TBS, faced no discernible sanction from that network when one of her monologues inveighed against Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, as a “feckless c***.”

Bee’s wax profane also marked a milestone in public discourse. One strains to recall another instance in which “the C word” figured in political letters or satire (the closest antecedent, to my knowledge, is Milton Berle’s reported use of the term behind closed doors, as in “Good evening, gentlemen and c....” in the monologue he came out of retirement to deliver at the Friars Club’s first meeting allowing women). Undaunted even after Bee issued a statement of apology, Jon Stewart, the liberal former host of "The Daily Show," defended her remarks.

What should surprise us about the wide agreement on the part of the entertainment elites that such attacks on figures of the right are proper or even imperative, as when Broadway rose as one for De Niro, is not the misguided inference that mean-spiritedness exists on only one side of the divide. It’s that those who applauded De Niro are, like him, artists, the people in society who are most supposed to cherish elegance in word and song, cleverness and stylishness of wit and delivery.

Embraces of “f*** you” are as much a betrayal of the standards of artistry as of public decency, and thus, one would think, an unconscionable dereliction for serious artists.

This is not to say there is no place in the arts for profanity; De Niro’s masterpieces are testament to the contrary, and George Carlin, a bona fide standup comedian, fought this battle long ago. But the telecast of the Tony Awards is, by most accounts and irrespective of political ideology, not the venue for it.

* * *

Perhaps De Niro’s resort to barbarism is explicable not solely as a measure of his being disconcerted by the fact that Trump has scored his share of policy successes, but as a reflection of astonishment that the power of the entertainment elites to shape popular opinion, and, with it, political outcomes, is now intermittent at best. After all, Mr. Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 delivered to that establishment, and several others, more or less the same message De Niro unleashed on the Tony Awards.

Having covered the Obama administration’s protracted decision-making over the Keystone XL oil pipeline, I detected a distinct shift in the White House’s position in 2011— an abandonment of early support for the project, as was once telegraphed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (“We're either going to be dependent on dirty oil from the Gulf or dirty oil from Canada”) — once the comedic actress Julia Louis Dreyfus, of "VEEP" fame, released a short video opposing the project. It was as if President Obama recognized, on the eve of his re-election campaign, that he had been served formal notice by the environmental left, via Hollywood, that his base would not tolerate on the pipeline issue one of the chief executive’s infrequent forays into pro-business government.

The man De Niro introduced at the Tonys, Bruce Springsteen, has spent many cycles performing at campaign rallies for Democratic nominees; ditto for widely beloved classic rock musicians Carol King, James Taylor, and others. If their artistic visions had prevailed, John Kerry and John Edwards would have run the West Wing for this century’s first decade, and Mrs. Clinton would today be practicing her unique brand of realpolitik with her party’s Bernie Sanders wing.

For his part, Trump responded to De Niro’s assault what were, for the incumbent, muted terms. “Robert De Niro, a very Low IQ individual, has received too many shots to the head by real boxers in movies,” the president tweeted at 5:40 a.m. on Wednesday. “I watched him last night and truly believe he may be ‘punch-drunk.’” In a second blast, Trump faulted De Niro for not recognizing the country’s buzzing economy, before closing with: “Punchy!”

In Trumpian rhetoric, this is surprisingly mild stuff, perhaps reflecting a decision by the president to treat De Niro, with his unprecedented vulgarity, as just one more figurine in the president’s glass menagerie of Twitter victims, the same theater in which the winning candidate of 2016 made such short work of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (“Little Marco and Lyin’ Ted”) and Elizabeth Warren (“Pocahontas”). Now we have Punchy. De Niro’s iconic film roles probably ensure he will more readily be remembered, as he would wish, as the young Vito Corleone, Travis Bickle, or Rupert Pupkin, and not by the presidential sobriquet his onstage eruption earned him.

For supporters of the president, more than once unsettled by his Twitter antics because they sense that the tweets can just as easily impede as advance progress on core #MAGA policies, the response to De Niro should provide a measure of solace. After all, a mercurial leader also given to extremes in his rhetoric (e.g., the heinous tweets about Mika Brzezinski) witnessed the worst kind of profane attack on him, launched from the epicenter of American theater, and, playing against type, chose not to fight fire with fire or fury. This suggests that Mr. Trump may be, to the horror of his sworn and swearing enemies, growing in the job.

At such junctures the president is well advised to recall the words of a Democrat: the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a polymath who served as ambassador to the United Nations and senator from New York (succeeded there by Hillary Clinton). Amid the tumult of the midterm elections in the fall of 1970, Moynihan, who was then working in the White House, having been tapped by the unorthodox Richard Nixon to work on urban problems, sent a memorandum to the chief executive, unpublished until now, in which Moynihan cautioned the outsider president he served, so easily given to resentment over the perceived snubs of the left-wing elites: “The president of the United States, for the sake of the dignity of the Republic, must endure the indignities of her politics.”

James Rosen, a former chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, is the author of three books, including The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate and Cheney One on One.

