Meryl Streep went HAM on US President Donald Trump during her speech at the Golden Globes last month, and boy oh boy – did she receive one of his classic Twitter tongue-lashings over it.
In her speech, she called out Trump for mocking a disabled reporter, saying that if our President sets that kind of precedent, people will feel as though they have permission to be disrespectful of others:
“There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.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 incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”
Trump hit back on Twitter, literally proving Streep‘s point with his classic move of name-calling:
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…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017
Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never “mocked” a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him…….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017
“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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017
Now – up with this shit, Streep will not put. Overnight, she attended the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) 2017 Greater New York Gala Dinner, where she was honoured with the LGBTQ+ organisation’s ‘Ally for Equality‘ Award.
Streep took to the stage and discussed Trump for the second time this year, and once again did this without ever saying his name (which, if you think about it, might be the thing that infuriates Trump the most).
She told the cheering crowd,
“’Evil prospers when good men do nothing’… ain’t that the truth.We shouldn’t be surprised that fundamentalists, of all stripes, everywhere, are exercised and fuming. We shouldn’t be surprised that these profound changes come at a much steeper cost than it seems would lie true in the 20th century. We shouldn’t be surprised if not everyone is totally down with it.But if we live through this precarious moment… if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank this president for because he will have woken us up to how fragile freedom really is…The whip of the Executive can, through a Twitter feed, lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimise the press and imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability.”
The much-loved actress also clarified one the comments from her original speech:
“I do like football… I have watched more football in 60 years than anybody here. But if you hear a woman in a restaurant say, ‘My son is very interested in the arts,’ she’s not talking about football or mixed martial arts because they’re just not the same thing.Some of us like football, some of us like the arts, many of us want both in our lives… I was making a joke, and Mike Nichols told me, ‘If you have to explain the joke, Meryl, you’re doomed.’”
Finally, she addressed Trump’s ridiculous tweets about her:
“Yes, I am the most overrated, over-decorated, and currently, over-berated actress… of my generation.But that is why you invited me here! Right?”
Watch some of Streep’s passionate speech below:
Source: Youtube.
Photo: Neil Mockford / Getty.
