Trump’s bullying hits new low

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This article was published 10/01/2017 (3222 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The worlds of Hollywood entertainment and U.S. politics became further intertwined Sunday when actor Meryl Streep and U.S. president-elect Donald Trump exchanged rhetorical broadsides.

Ms. Streep, with a long list of honours conferred by her peers, was called to the Golden Globe awards of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to receive the Cecil B. DeMille award for a lifetime of cinematic achievement. In her acceptance speech, she alluded to a 2015 speech by Mr. Trump in which he twisted his face and flailed his arms in imitation of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter afflicted with arthrogryposis, which causes jerky movements of his limbs. Mr. Kovaleski had disputed Mr. Trump’s account of thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the 9/11 attacks on New York.

This “instinct to humiliate,” Ms. Streep said, “when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”

As though to prove her point, Mr. Trump promptly responded on Twitter with a string of insults directed against Ms. Streep. He wrote: “Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never ‘mocked’ a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him ‘grovelling’ when he totally changed a 16-year-old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!”

Overrated? Ms. Streep’s lifetime achievement award from the Foreign Press Association, following on her 19 Academy Award nominations and three Oscars, her 30 Golden Globe nominations and eight awards, amply express the esteem of her colleagues. Mr. Trump totally missed the mark there. Ms. Streep did support Hillary Clinton for president but never as a flunky — a low-level servant. As for claiming that he never mocked Mr. Kovaleski? An oft-played film clip shows him doing just that.

It is rare for a film and television awards show to become a platform for political debate. It is also odd for the president-elect, two weeks before his inauguration, to fling insults at a film actor. But the flinging of insults has become a favourite indoor sport in the era of social media and anonymous online commentary and the instinct to humiliate, as Ms. Streep rightly called it, is baked into Mr. Trump’s character. It matches the temper of these times in the United States, and Mr. Trump is happy to lead the parade of verbal abuse. No one else has to join that parade, but there is probably no stopping it these next four years.