Trump got skewered at the Golden Globes. But Meryl Streep really tore strips off him
Only a few seconds into his monologue, host Jimmy Fallon noted that the Globes was “one of the few places left where America still honours the popular vote.”
He was just getting started. Fallon went on to compare the president-elect to the evil King Joffrey in Game of Thrones.
“What would it be like if King Joffrey had lived?” Fallon asked.
“Well, in 12 days we’re going to find out.”
Watch: Oscar winner Meryl Streep berates US president-elect Donald Trump
Streep took things in a much more serious direction, excoriating Trump without mentioning his name in an impassioned speech as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award.
“It was the 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,” Streep said.
“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modelled 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 also referenced Trump’s policies on immigration when she pointedly listed the multicultural heritage of many Hollywood actors.
“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners and if you kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts,” Streep said, to cheers.
Watch: Trump gives unflattering impression of disabled reporter during election campaign
Trump, later hit back at Streep, calling her an overrated actress: “Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes.
“She is a Hillary flunky who lost big,” he wrote on Twitter.
The tweet was Trump’s second public response to the Streep speech. Early on Monday, he said in a telephone interview with The New York Times: “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.”
Streep’s comments on Trump also drew a backlash among conservatives on social media, including Senator John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, a Fox News host who has been critical of Trump.
“This Meryl Streep speech is why Trump won. And if people in Hollywood don’t start recognizing why and how – you will help him get re-elected,” McCain tweeted.
In Fallon’s monologue, he referred to a Streep film: Florence Foster Jenkins, in which she stars as “the worst opera singer in the world.”
Fallon added: “Even she turned down performing at Trump’s inauguration.”
The mournful drama Manchester by the Sea he joked, was “the only thing from 2016 that was more depressing than 2016.” He also noted that votes were tabulated by the accounting firm of “Ernst & Young & Putin.”
Hugh Laurie, accepting his award for best supporting actor in The Night Manager, also indulged in Trump jokes, speculating that this would perhaps be the last Golden Globes ceremony.
“I don’t mean to be gloomy, but it has the words ‘Hollywood,’ ‘foreign’ and ‘press’ in the title,” Laurie said, explaining his pessimism about the awards surviving the Trump era. He added that some Republicans don’t even like the word “association.”
He accepted his award “on behalf of psychopathic billionaires everywhere.”
Additional reporting by Associated Press
