“This Meryl Streep speech is why Trump won,” warned Meghan McCain. “And if people in Hollywood don’t start recognizing why and how — you will help him get reelected.”
No sale. The argument that Trump voters flocked to a TV star as a counterreaction to Hollywood values is an unsupported and barely disguised attempt to try to muzzle opposition by suggesting that anything anyone in entertainment says or does about Trump will only make things worse. There’s no basis to believe that, or to trust the motives of those who articulate it as a self-reinforcing principle that insists the very act of using a public platform to speak against Trump proves that you’re out of touch with the people to whom you’re speaking. Streep’s speech was extremely shrewd; there wasn’t a line in it that the right could extract and use to portray her as living in a bubble of privilege or oblivion. And she knew her audience well: She was reaching people who were appalled by Trump’s taste for nastiness, including some who swallowed hard and voted for him anyway. It changed nothing — but, reached after midnight by the New York Times’s Patrick Healy, Trump reminded people that Streep was a Clinton supporter, and insisted he never “’mocked’ a disabled reporter” (he did, of course, and his statement that he didn’t has given the press permission to remind everyone he did ). Then he went to bed, apparently slept very little, and, again, woke up in a mood. In a mini-fusillade of irate predawn tweets, he seethed that Streep is “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood” and “a Hillary flunky who lost big.”
In other words, she got to him.
Hollywood’s Protests Are Getting to Trump – Vulture
