Meryl Streep Slams Donald Trump In Lifetime Achievement Award Acceptance Speech

Meryl Streep was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s Golden Globes, and took the opportunity to discuss Donald Trump and the state of politics in this country.

MERYL STREEP TALKS TRUMP IN LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT SPEECH

“You and all of us in this room really, belong to are the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it, Hollywood, foreigners, and the press. But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway, it’s just a bunch of people from other places,” the actress says. She lists off names of fellow actors and actresses and where they were born and raised, and asks, “Where are their birth certificates?”

“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if you kick us all out, you’ll have nothing to watch except for football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts,” Streep said, to raucous applause.

She expressed gratitude for the other actors and actresses who put on stellar performances this year, but spoke in depth about one in particular. “But there was one performance this year that stunned me,” she began. “It sank it’s hooks in my heart, 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.”

“It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out my head because it wasn’t in a movie, it was in real life,” she said, clearly talking about Trump. “And this instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in a public platform, it filters down into everyone’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same.

“Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.” The room was silent listening to her every word.

“Ok, this brings me to the press,” she said to applause again. “We need the principle press to hold power to account to call them on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our Constitution, so I only ask the famously well-healed Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the committee to protect journalists, ’cause we’re gonna need them going forward and they’re going to need us to safeguard the truth.”

Streep concluded her speech fighting back tears with a tribute to the late Carrie Fisher. “As my friend the dear departed Princess Leia said to me once – ‘take a broken heart, make it into art.’ Thank you.”

Streep has won 8 Golden Globes, been nominated for 18 Academy Awards and took home three, and was awarded with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award tonight.