Trump blasts Meryl Streep after Golden Globes speech

President-elect Donald Trump is firing back at Meryl Streep after the actress used her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes to scold him for mocking a disabled reporter during the presidential campaign.

“Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes,” Trump tweeted, noting that Streep had campaigned for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

“She is a Hillary flunky who lost big,” Trump wrote.

During her speech, the 67-year-old three-time Oscar winner said there were “many, many powerful performances” by actors this year, “but there was one performance this year that stunned” her.

“It sank its hooks in my heart,” she 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. Someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back.”

During a rally in November 2015, Trump launched into an impression of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who suffers from arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition, after Kovaleski pushed back against Trump’s use of a 2001 article he wrote as proof of the candidate’s false assertion that “thousands and thousands of people” in Muslim neighborhoods in New Jersey were cheering in the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

“It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,” Streep continued. “And I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. 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 kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”

Trump has claimed he wasn’t mocking Kovaleski’s disability, but merely his nerves. At the time, Kovaleski said he had interviewed Trump in his office and was once on a first-name basis with the real estate magnate. “Despite having one of the all-time great memories, I certainly do not remember him,” Trump said of the reporter in 2015.

“I was never mocking anyone,” Trump told the Times on Sunday night. “I was calling into question a reporter who had gotten nervous because he had changed his story.

“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,” Trump continued.

On Monday, Trump again sought to clarify his impersonation of Kovaleski.

“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 wrote on Twitter. “Just more very dishonest media!”

In an interview with “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and senior adviser, said Streep’s comments were concerning.

“I’m concerned that somebody with a platform like Meryl Streep’s is inciting people’s worst instincts,” Conway said.

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