Meryl Streep slams Donald Trump in a moving speech

The multi-award winning actor takes on The Donald at this year's Golden Globe Awards

Article by The Skinny | 09 Jan 2017

During the Golden Globes, famed for its fluffy superficiality, the award’s most celebrated actor, Meryl Streep, got political. While collecting the Cecil B DeMille award for outstanding contribution to entertainment (the ninth Golden Globe prize of the star's career), Streep used her platform to slam the one performance this year that “stunned” her: that of Donald Trump’s during his successful US election campaign.

“It sank its hooks in my heart,” said Streep, “not because it was good – there was nothing good about it – but it was effective and it did its job… 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.

“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,” she continued. “Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”

Her speech began by celebrating Hollywood’s diversity. “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mix martial arts, which are not the arts.”

The President-elect responded in his usual very unpresidential fashion by dismissing Streep on Twitter, describing her as a “Hillary flunky who lost big” and calling the three time Oscar-winner and nine time Golden Globe-winner “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood.”

Watch Streep’s speech in full below: