Donald Trump criticizes Meryl Streep’s Golden Globe comments

President-elect Donald Trump called actress Meryl Streep “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood” on Monday in response to her Golden Globes award speech that cast the Republican as a “bully.”

Streep, in accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award at Sunday night’s ceremony in Los Angeles, did not name the president-elect in her speech, but criticized his campaign rhetoric and his impersonation of a disabled New York Times reporter at a November 2015 campaign rally.

“There was one performance this year that stunned me — it sank its hooks in my heart,” Streep told the audience.

“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. 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. 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.”

Streep, who spoke at last year’s Democratic National Convention, was a prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

Trump came under fire during the campaign from disability rights groups for what many interpreted as his mocking of the disability of reporter Serge F. Kovaleski at a campaign rally at which he pretended to be the reporter, flailing his arms.

In a series of Monday morning tweets, Trump repeated his long-standing defense that he was not attacking Kovaleski, who suffers from a disability that restricts movement of his limbs, but rather was impersonating the reporter’s “groveling” to Trump after he raised questions about an article Kovaleski wrote in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes,” Trump wrote shortly before 6:30 a.m. “She is a Hillary flunky who lost big. 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. Just more very dishonest media!”

Singer and actress Barbara Streisand also sounded off on Trump, saying in an interview with MSNBC that “You can’t trust anything he says...If you get on his wrong side he will blast you.”

Trump, on the campaign trail, had cited an article written by Kovaleski to support his claim that “thousands” of Muslims were seen celebrating the 9/11 attacks in Jersey City. Kovaleski has said law enforcement officials initially reported detaining “a number” of people who appeared to be celebrating the attacks, but subsequent reporting never substantiated those claims.

Last year Trump called Streep one of his favorite actresses in an interview with “The Hollywood Reporter,” calling her “excellent” and “a fine person, too.”

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By Laura Figueroa Hernandez

laura.figueroa@newsday.com@Laura_Figueroa

Laura Figueroa Hernandez is the White House correspondent and previously covered New York City politics and government. She joined Newsday in 2012 after covering state and local politics for The Miami Herald.