Donald Trump has launched an offensive against Meryl Streep for speaking out against him at last night's Golden Globes.

Watch the speech Streep gave as she accepted her Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award. In it, the actress comes for Donald Trump—without mentioning him by name at any point—by dismantling the President-elect's stance on immigrants and expressing heartbreak and anger at his mocking of reporter Serge Kovaleski's disability—all while hypnotizing us into submission with her mirrored Givenchy gown.

Here are a few choice quotes:

After noting—without the use of a telepromter, thanks, Jimmy Fallon—the varied origins of her fellow nominees, Streep laid out this nightmare scenario:

Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick ‘em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

Chilling. Next, Streep showed her anguish at the monstrously effective crowd-baiting behavior that helped elect the next President:

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.

She continued (remember this quote—it will become important later):

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. And the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.

It was a masterful showing by Streep. Vulture's Mark Harris lays out her tactics:

She didn’t use Trump’s name — an approach borrowed from Michelle Obama; she didn’t rant; she didn’t make fun of his vulgarity or his wealth or his empty promises or his tweeting or his voters. She picked the one thing that would make it hard for critics to brand her an out-of-touch Hollywood liberal — his propensity to use cruelty to play to his audience — and zeroed in on it. By contextualizing him as a performer, she leveled the playing field and went after him actor to actor. And when Meryl Streep does that to you, it’s a contest you’re not going to win.

And he didn't.

We can all set our watches to the President-elect's defensive Twitter mewling, and his predictable response to Streep came at his preferred hour of 3:27 am—because who can sleep when women are out in the world, saying things about you that you don't like.




I mean...is that the best he's got? Meryl Streep is over-rated and is a Clinton supporter? Pretty weak. Just look at this post on Elle of Streep gifs that comment on current events. What about the Taste of Streep Instagram account? Could an over-rated actress blend as well into a taco bowl as she can into the role of a wealthy woman who buys her way into the New York classical music scene?

taco salad tuesday #merylstreep #tacotuesday #tacosalad

A photo posted by taste of streep (@tasteofstreep) on

Trump, who is as wrong about Streep's acting abilities as he is about—well, here's today's list—elaborated his position to the New York Times this morning, saying he was "not surprised" about Streep's remarks, he wasn't making fun of that reporter, and also that plenty of famous people like him and are coming to the inauguration and you just try to get a decent dress in D.C. right now. You can't!

Trump then sent his main minion (sorry, senior advisor) Kellyanne Conway to Fox & Friends this morning as a criticism shield. Perhaps after a late night of Globes watching and drinking one of those famous Trump Grill martinis, Conway pulled the old "Trump's rubber, Streep's glue" defense, bouncing the actresses's words about Trump using his platform to bring out the worst in people off of him to (not) stick to her.

That, or Conway has a crack sense of irony.


It appears that by "worst instincts," Conway means not giving Trump—a man who seems more concerned with defending himself from awards show attacks than preparing to lead the country—a chance. And Conway really, really wants us to give Trump a chance. She wants us to judge the next President not by his words or actions, but by "what's in his heart." Which, just to remind you, is this:

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