It’s been a little over a month since Meryl Streep called out Donald Trump’s horrible and intolerant views during a speech at the Golden Globes and Trump fired back by calling her “overrated” in one of his many early-morning Twitter rants, and now Streep is speaking out against Trump once again. At this weekend’s Human Rights Campaign’s 2017 Greater New York Gala event, Streep essentially dismissed the rise of people like Trump and Mike Pence as the last grasp for relevancy from a dying, outdated system, explaining that the last “40,000 years” of civilization have been built around the assumption that “might made right, the biggest and richest and baddest was the best, and ‘The Man’ was pretty much always a man.”
In the last few years, though, “women began to be regarded as, if not equal, at least deserving of equal rights,” and then men and women of color and “people of sexual orientation and gender identification outside the status quo also demanded equal regard under the law,” which has caused the people who were in power for the last 40,000 years to lash out. She goes on to say:
We should not be surprised that these profound changes come at a steeper cost than we originally thought. 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. 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, delegitimize the press and imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability.
Streep also took a moment to explain that she meant no offense when noting that football and MMA are “not the arts” in her Golden Globes speech, pointing out that she was a cheerleader for seven of her “youngest, prettiest years” and that she’s spent the last 60 years watching football, whether its Pee Wee league or professional. She also said that the recent Super Bowl was “the most exciting football game in history” and that it’s “totally crazy that the winning advantage” is determined by a coin toss.
You can read Streep’s full speech—which is predictably excellent—at this Hollywood Reporter link.