Conway accuses Meryl Streep of 'inciting people's worst instincts'

Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes speech Sunday night was a disappointment, incoming counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Monday morning, stating that the actress offered a divisive message indicative of Hollywood’s “self-pity” instead of a unifying one.

Streep, who was honored with a lifetime achievement award by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association at the Golden Globes awards show, devoted significant time in her acceptance remarks to criticizing Donald Trump. She accused the president-elect of bullying and said his speech last year in which he seemingly mocked a disabled person was the “one performance this year that stunned me.”


“She sounds like 2014. The election is over. She lost,” Conway said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.” “Everybody in that audience, with very few exceptions, was of a single, myopic mind as to how they wanted the election to go and how they expected the election to go. They lost, and I really wish she would have stood up last night and said ‘Look, I didn’t like the election results, but he’s our president and we’re going to support him.’”

Conway accused Streep of “inciting people’s worst instincts” with her speech. Trump’s incoming counselor said the time would have been put to better usesearching for common ground with the incoming administration, something Conway suggested the president-elect “has actually done from moment one.”

“But this is Hollywood. I think where there is self-pity, a lot more self-awareness would do them some charm,” she continued. “Talking about how vilified poor Hollywood is, in their gazillion-dollar gowns. Can I borrow a couple of those for the inaugural, please?”

Trump shot back at Streep as well, taking to Twitter to label her “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood” and a “Hillary flunky who lost big.” As he has in the past, Trump disputed the notion that he had mocked the reporter, The New York Times’ Serge Kovaleski, insisting that he was mimicking the nervousness of a reporter backing away from a story years after the fact.

Trump had used a 2001 story by Kovaleski as the basis for his fictitious claim that thousands of Muslims celebrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on rooftops in New Jersey. Trump insisted he had seen video of the incident, although none has ever been uncovered, and Kovaleski disputed Trump’s understanding of the event.

On “Fox & Friends,” Conway wondered aloud why Streep had used her time on stage to attack Trump’s supposed mockery of a disabled individual and not to call attention to a recent case from Chicago in which four people were arrested last week for allegedly torturing a teenager with special needs and streaming the episode live on Facebook. Conway noted the races of those involved, four African-American suspects and a white victim, and said that if Streep is truly concerned about the disabled community, she should speak out about the incident in Chicago.

“I’m glad that Meryl Streep has such a passion for the disabled, because I didn’t hear her weigh in and I didn’t hear her even use her platform last night, Ainsley, to give a shoutout to the mentally challenged boy who last week was tortured live on Facebook for half an hour by four young African-American adults who were screaming racial and anti-Trump expletives and forcing him to put his head in toilet water,” Conway told Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt. “So I’d like to hear from her today, if she wants to come and continue her platform on behalf of the disabled.”

