STREEP TEARS INTO TRUMP

‘When the powerful use their position to bully, we all lose’

Screen legend Meryl Streep tore into Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and denounced him as a bully who humiliated others while receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes, prompting the President-elect to dismiss her as a “Hillary lover”.

Streep, an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton, slammed the next US President while accepting the Cecil B DeMille Award.

The three-time Oscar winner took swipes at Trump’s divisive rhetoric without naming him as she cautioned against powerful people using their position to “bully others”.

“Who are we and what is Hollywood, anyway? It is just a place with a bunch of people from other places,” the 67-year-old actress said.

“Amy Adams was born in  Italy, Natalie Portman in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And  Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is playing an Indian raised in Tasmania,” she said.

“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 arts.”

Streep said the “performance” that stood out this year did not belong to an actor but to Trump when he publicly mocked a disabled reporter.

“There was nothing good about it, but 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, and I still can’t get it out my head because it wasn’t in a movie, it was in real life. That instinct to humiliate when it’s modelled by someone in a public platform, it filters down into everyone’s life because it gives permission for others to do the same,” Streep cautioned.

Trump, meanwhile, said he was “not surprised” he had come under attack from “liberal movie people”.