Meryl Streep Takes Aim At Trump; Trump Takes To Twitter

LOS ANGELES, CA — As Hollywood honored the famously fearless Meryl Streep with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes Sunday night, she took the opportunity to share the spotlight with another “performer,” President-elect Donald Trump. He didn’t appreciate it.

While she used her acceptance speech to take him to task for being a “bully,” he took to his preferred bully pulpit, Twitter, to denounce Streep as “one of the most over-rated (sic) actresses in Hollywood” and “a Hillary flunky who lost big.”

It was the Hollywood liberal versus the billionaire politician, the artist versus the brawler.

Though offering the most overtly political speech of the night, a clear take-down of Trump without ever mentioning his name, she did so in deeply personal terms.

“But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart,” she said. “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, and 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 kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”

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It was a speech that took aim not only at Trump but also at those who condone his behavior. Trump and his supporters were quick to fire back.

“Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated (sic) actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes,” he tweeted in his opening salvo. “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!”

One of Trump’s supporters in the media was among the first to attack Streep.

“I love Meryl Streep but her anti-Trump speech was rank hypocrisy & just inflamed America's division,” tweeted Piers Morgan.

Conservative Trump critic Megan McCain also lashed out on Twitter."This Meryl Streep speech is why Trump won," she wrote. "And if people in Hollywood don't start recognizing why and how - you will help him get re-elected."

But Streep’s speech didn’t seem aimed at winning over Trump supporters. She issued a rallying cry to those seemingly endangered in Trump’s America - the artists, the foreigners, the press.

“You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press,” she said. “OK, this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth...As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.” Photo: Youtube Screengrab