Meryl Streep, who was a passionate supporter of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, took a dig on US President-elect Donald Trump without even taking his name in her Cecil B. DeMille Award speech at the 74th annual Golden Globes 2017.
The controversial and rhetoric behaviour of President-elect Donald Trump on Hollywood with the vehement charges of elitism and to call for people in the performing arts to remain resilient and proactive in the face of intolerance, made her give out the taste of his own medicine.
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She was quoted saying;
“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners,” Streep said after describing the diverse backgrounds of some of her acting contemporaries (“Where are their birth certificates?” she asked pointedly).
“So if you kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts. And that is not the arts,” she said.
The “Florence Foster Jenkins” star called out Trump’s infamous (and often-disputed) mimicking of a disabled New York Times reporter earlier last year, which many have argued was a deliberate attempt to mock members of that community.
“It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life,” Streep said. “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. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose,” she added. “We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage.”
She called on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which organizes the awards) and the audience to support the Committee to Project Journalists and ended her emotional speech with a tribute to Hollywood performers’ ability to convey empathy through their work.
While Streep’s address was the most prolonged political statement of the night, it wasn’t the only one. Although perpetually peppy host Jimmy Fallon called for Sunday’s awards to be a “celebration” of the arts, there was a bit of a political elephant in the room — and it was Trump.
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