Meryl Streep prefaced her attack on Donald Trump at the Golden Globes by saying that she had lost her voice. She has had a rough few days of partying since Obama’s blow-out bash at the White House last Friday night, to which she and other stars had been invited.
Given a lifetime achievement award for acting on Sunday night, she devoted her acceptance remarks not to acting but to politics. She even punctuated her remarks by urging actors to mend their post-election broken “hearts through art” — a call for propagandistic movies that she hopes will disabuse the masses of any pro-Trump sympathies.
The actors in attendance hung on her words with bated breath (except maybe Ron Paul supporter Vince Vaughn and Mel Gibson who were criticized afterwards for not looking at Streep in a sufficiently worshipful manner). She called the bejeweled crowd “outsiders” in a nice delusional touch. No “please wrap it up” sign flashed as she rattled on. Actresses wept as she recalled Trump’s treatment of a disabled reporter who had no “capacity to fight back.” Never mind that the establishment media, on his behalf, has been fighting back ever since, subjecting that episode to greater and greater hysterical interpretation.
The premise of Streep’s remarks was that Trump is a bully and she and fellow members of the ruling class are victims. But the American people never found that claim convincing in a race where Hillary and her powerful friends had all the advantages. True outsiders in the Rust Belt saw Trump as an underdog encircled by coastal elites — a view that Streep’s self-indulgent speech to a room full of petulant and entitled elitists will only deepen.