TRENTON — Meryl Streep claims she’s been set up for attack by “armies of brownshirts” ever since her January Golden Globes acceptance speech criticizing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, but said she is undaunted.
“It’s terrifying to put the target on your forehead, and it sets you up for all sorts of attacks and armies of brownshirts and bots and worse, and the only way you can do it is to feel you have to,” Streep said in address to attendees of the Human Rights Campaign’s Saturday evening awards gala in New York City.
Brownshirts is the colloquial term for the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi party which helped bring Adolf Hitler to power by intimidating citizens.
In January, while accepting her lifetime achievement award at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe Awards, Streep warned that “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners” and that “if you kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
Though Streep did not mention Trump by name in her Globes speech, it provoked a firestorm of criticism by conservative media outlets, football fans and even an Twitter broadside from the president himself, who derided her as a “Hillary flunky.”
Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2017
In her Saturday night speech before the Human Rights Campaign, Streep – who’s up for her twentieth Oscar nomination – jokingly referenced Trump’s attacks.
“I am the most overrated, overdecorated and, currently, over-berated actress, who likes football, of my generation,” Ms. Streep said, to great applause.
Trump attacks Meryl Streep on Twitter
“I do like football,” Ms. Streep added, provoking laughter from the crowd at the Waldorf Astoria. “I was making a joke, and Mike Nichols told me, ‘If you have to explain the joke, Meryl, you’re doomed.'”
She then added that Trump’s propensity to strike back at all who criticize him put the safety of the nation and the world at risk.
“If his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank this president for,” Streep said, “Because he will have woken us up to how fragile freedom really is.”
Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.
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