From a fan to a foe. Although Donald Trump slammed Meryl Streep for her impassioned Golden Globes speech (which you can watch above) and called her “overrated,” he was once a big fan of the award-winning actress — less than a year and a half ago, in fact.
When asked by The Hollywood Reporter in August 2015 if there are any actresses that he loves, Trump praised the Florence Foster Jenkins star. “Julia Roberts is terrific, and many others. Meryl Streep is excellent; she’s a fine person, too,” he said. “The problem is I’ll name three or four or five [actresses] and then the hundred that I know will be insulted, and I don’t mean to insult them.”
As previously reported, Streep, 67, gave a speech which was highly critical of the business mogul, 70, while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award on Sunday, January 8. She called him out for mocking a disabled reporter, saying, “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. … This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.” While she never mentioned Trump by name, the Mamma Mia! actress also insinuated that he uses his position to “bully others” and called for Hollywood to “protect journalists.”
In response, Trump took to Twitter to blast Streep calling her “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood” and a “Hillary flunky who lost big.” He then claimed that he never mocked a disabled reporter, but “simply showed him ‘groveling’ when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad.”
The former Apprentice host told The New York Times on Monday that he had not seen Streep’s comments but was “not surprised” that “liberal movie people” were attacking him. “I was never mocking anyone,” he said. “I was calling into question a reporter who had gotten nervous because he had changed his story.”
