January 9, 2017

Meryl Streep Tears Into This Year’s Most Despicable Performance: Donald Trump

The president-elect dismissed the legendary actress as a “Hillary flunky.”

 


 

While accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes on Sunday, Meryl Streep delivered an impassioned speech aimed at Donald Trump, slamming the president-elect for his hateful rhetoric and anti-immigration views.

“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 legendary actress then referenced the shocking campaign incident from November 2015, when Trump mocked a disabled New York Times reporter during one of his rallies—a performance Streep said truly “stunned” her.

“It sank my heart, it sank its hooks in my heart,” she said. “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.”

“I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.”

With Trump’s inauguration less than two weeks away, Streep also called on a “principled press” to hold him accountable over the next four years. Trump took to Twitter shortly after to hit back at Streep, denying he ever “mocked” a disabled reporter.

 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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