Despite the online backlash she received from the President’s fans after her Golden Globes’ attack, Hollywood legend Meryl Streep hadn’t finished booting the boot in yet.
During another emotional speech, this time at Manhattan gala for the Human Rights Campaign, a non-profit that advocates LGBT equality, Meryl dusted herself off for round two with the beleaguered ‘leader of the free world’.
Wow.
Preach, Meryl. pic.twitter.com/5Fgw5AZOjp
— Raymond Braun (@raymondbraun) February 12, 2017
“If we live through this precarious moment, if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank our current leader for,” said Meryl.
“He will have woken us up to how fragile freedom is. The whip of the executive, through a Twitter feed, can lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimise the press and imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability.”
It was the first time the acclaimed actress had spoken so publicly about Trump since the Golden Globes.
Her remarks last month triggered angry tweets the following morning from Trump, who called Meryl “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood” and “a Hillary flunky who lost big.”
At the weekend event in New York, Meryl finally addressed Trump’s critical tweets about her for the first time.
“Yes, I am the most overrated, overdecorated and, currently, I am the most over-berated actress … of my generation,” she told the gala audience.
Meryl also told the audience that she had become a target of attacks since her Golden Globes speech, including from “brownshirts,” a reference to the Nazi militia.
“It’s terrifying to put the target on your forehead,” Meryl said. “And it 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. You have to! You don’t have an option. You have to.”
She said that her usual instinct was to stay at home and read, garden and “load the dishwasher” – but that “the weight of all these honours” drove her to continue to speak out.
Meryl was at the gala to receive the Human Rights Campaign’s National Ally for Equality Award. She dedicated the honour to her gay and transgender teachers, colleagues and friends.
In particular, Meryl remembered two teachers from her childhood in New Jersey: a middle-school music teacher who became one of the first transgender women in the country, and her piano teacher, who lived with his partner for more than 50 years.
Wow. Meryl Streep is singing a song that she learned on a field trip to the Statue of Liberty as a child. pic.twitter.com/LZgqxNg0mZ
— Raymond Braun (@raymondbraun) February 12, 2017
“I am not going to introduce you to all my gay teachers, just some of the most influential personalities in my past, the memorable people who made me an artist and who lived, unnecessarily, under duress,” she said.
She then spoke about the progress that had been made in recent decades on human rights and equality.
“Amazingly, and, in terms of human history, blazingly fast, culture seemed to have shifted; the old hierarchies and entitlements seemed to have been upended.
“Which brings us to now. We should not be surprised that fundamentalists, of every stripe, are exercised and fuming. We should not be surprised that these profound changes come at a steeper cost than we originally thought. We should not be surprised that not everyone is actually cool with it.”
