…. Trump replies her
At the just concluded Golden Globe awards , Meryl Streep delivered an emotional speech, she condemned Donald Trump for imitating a disabled reporter while campaigning to be president, saying it “gives permission” to others to do the same.
Meryl was accepting the Cecil B DeMille award on the night, and she used her speech to speak about what she said was the “one performance this year that stunned [her]”, referring to when Trump mocked the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski.
“There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart,” Streep said. “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.”
In the presence of a visibly stunned room of stars who are famous for being energetic at the Golden Globes, she went on to add that Trump’s actions had legitimized bullying and that it could trickle down into people’s everyday lives.
“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform,” she said. “By someone powerful, it filters down into everyone’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.
“Disrespect invites disrespect, violence invites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”
Trump responded to Streep’s speech by saying that although he hadn’t seen her remarks he was “not surprised” that he had come under attack from “liberal movie people.”
He revealed to the New York Times that he denied mocking Kovaleski. “I was never mocking anyone. I was calling into question a reporter who had gotten nervous because he had changed his story”, he said. “People keep saying I intended to mock the reporter’s disability, as if Meryl Streep and others could read my mind, and I did no such thing.”