Meryl Streep slams Trump at Golden Globes and Trump hits back
Meryl Streep was presented with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2017 Golden Globes, but the lifetime achievement honor seemed like the last thing on the actress’ mind as she took President-elect Donald Trump to task.
The actress said “the one performance this year that stunned me sank its hooks into my heart.”
She wasn’t referring work by any of her colleagues. Instead, she was talking about when Trump mocked a disabled New York Times reporter.
“It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life,” Streep said. “And this instinct -- to humiliate -- when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.”
“Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence invites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose,” she continued. “We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage.”
In three tweets Monday morning, Mr. Trump fired back, saying, “Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never “mocked” a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him “groveling” when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!”
Streep opened her speech by echoing Hugh Laurie’s remarks earlier in the show, when he joked that this would be the last Golden Globes, saying, “It has Hollywood, foreign and press in its name, so I just don’t know.”
She pointed out that many of the nominees that night were foreign-born, name-checking actors like Ryan Gosling, Natalie Portman and Dev Patel. “Where are their birth certificates?” she asked.
“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders,” continued the veteran actress. “And if you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts -- which are not the arts,” leading the audience to erupt into cheers.
Consevatives were quick to pounce on Streep’s remarks.
Among them, Meghan McCain, a Fox News Channel host and daughter of longtime Arizona senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain. She took to Twitter:
As did Fox News’ Sean Hannity:
