Trump slams Meryl Streep as over-rated 'Hillary flunky'

Donald Trump piled onto actress Meryl Streep in a Monday morning flurry of posts to his Twitter account, writing that she is "one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big.”

Without mentioning Trump by name, Streep, during her Golden Globes acceptance speech in which she criticized the president-elect as a bully who has shown “the instinct to humiliate,” took particular note of remarks the president-elect delivered in 2015, when he seemingly mocked a New York Times reporter with a disability.


“There was one performance this year that stunned me — it sank its hooks in my heart,” Ms. Streep said. “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,” she continued. “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 a phone interview, Trump told the New York Times that he was “not surprised” to have been attacked by “liberal movie people” but took issue with the notion that he had made fun of Serge Kovaleski, the reporter in question. Instead, the president-elect said his spastic motions at the podium that day were meant to suggest nervousness on the part of the reporter, whose 2001 story Trump used as evidence that he had seen video of Muslims celebrating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I was never mocking anyone… I was calling into question a reporter who had gotten nervous because he had changed his story,” Trump 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.”

“For the 100th time, I never ‘mocked’ a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him ‘groveling’ when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad,” Trump added on Twitter Monday morning. “Just more very dishonest media!”

View Conway accuses Meryl Streep of 'inciting people's worst instincts' Monday morning on 'Fox & Friends,' incoming counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway criticized Meryl Streep's Golden Globes speech.

The president-elect also noted in his interview with the Times that Streep had spoken at the Democratic National Convention over the summer, seemingly further evidence in Trump’s mind that the actress’s remarks at the Los Angeles awards show should be quickly dismissed. Streep, who was being awarded the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award, said Trump’s candidacy and looming presidency set a poor example for the rest of the world.

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

Unmoved, Trump said his inauguration, scheduled for next week, will feature plenty of star power and could boast a record-setting attendance.

“We are going to have an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout for the inauguration, and there will be plenty of movie and entertainment stars,” Mr. Trump said. “All the dress shops are sold out in Washington. It’s hard to find a great dress for this inauguration.”