Oscar-nominated actress Meryl Streep played the victim Saturday night, saying she’d become America’s most “over-berated” actress in the wake of her Golden Globes comments criticizing President Donald Trump.
Accepting the Human Rights Council’s “National Equality Award” for her work in the field of LGBT Rights, Streep addressed what she called a now-“fragile” freedom. She complained that her protracted awards speech, in which she lambasted Trump for his behavior on the campaign trail, had made her a target of the President. Trump called the actress “overrated” on Twitter.
“Yes, I am the most overrated, over-decorated and currently, I am the most over-berated actress … of my generation,” Streep said. “The whip of the executive can, through a Twitter feed, lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimize the press and all of the imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability.”
Poor thing.
The actress went on to claim that widespread derision for her remarks was the result of thugs commanded by Trump’s aides, but that her wealth of courage allowed her to persevere: “[Speaking out] sets you up for all sorts of attacks and armies of Brownshirts and bots and worse, and the only way you can do it is if you feel you have to.”
She told the gala audience that she would have preferred to stay home and “load the dishwasher,” rather than give a rousing speech to a roomful of people who agree with her, but it’s a chore that simply had to be done.
Streep also did not miss an opportunity to re-ignite her public war with Trump and the Americans who voted for him, claiming that his army of racist, sexist and uneducated followers was rebelling against a progressive vision that had left them behind. “We shouldn’t be surprised that fundamentalists, of all stripes, everywhere, are exercised and fuming,” she said.
She closed out her speech by cautioning the audience that Trump would lead the country to “nuclear winter.”
Streep still has several events to go this awards season, and has been nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Florence Foster Jenkins, so Meryl’s streak of courageous “resistance” could still go on for weeks—as long as there are audiences to award her for things, so that she can make speeches.
