Meryl Streep doubled down on her criticism of Donald Trump on Saturday with another biting speech in which she claimed to have been attacked by 'brownshirts and bots' for speaking out against him.

In a play on his description of her as the 'most overrated actress' in Hollywood, she told the audience at a gala for the LGBT group Human Rights Campaign that she had also become the most 'berated' star of her time for speaking out against him.

'I am the most overrated and the most over-decorated and currently, I am the most over-berated actress, who likes football, of my generation.'

The actress said she had no choice but to speak out against him at the Golden Globes but that she had been targeted for doing so.

'It's terrifying to put the target on your forehead and it sets you up for all sorts of attacks and armies of brownshirts and bots and worse, and the only way you can do it is if you feel you have to. You have to! You don't have an option. You have to.'

Brownshirts is the colloquial collective name used to describe the Sturmabteilung, an early branch of Nazi militia.

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Meryl Streep lashed out at Donald Trump again on Saturday as she gave a speech at an LGBT fundraiser in New York City (left) claiming she'd been attacked by 'brownshirts' for criticizing the president in January

Meryl Streep pays tribute to LGBTQ pioneers and those on the front lines of fighting for civil rights. pic.twitter.com/J6PdfbVTDm — Raymond Braun (@raymondbraun) February 12, 2017

It's not clear whether Streep's use of the word was directed at the president himself or of the many social media users who lashed out against her Golden Globes speech in which she accused Trump of inciting violence and disrespect.

She hooked her argument to his campaign trail imitation of a disabled New York Times reporter which she said was cruel and mocking. Trump maintains that he was not making fun of the journalist's disability.

'Terrifying': The actress said she felt she 'had to' use her Golden Globes speech in January to share her political views but that it daunted her

In an extension of the scathing January speech, on Saturday Streep said she'd have liked to have stayed at home and 'loaded the dishwasher' but that she felt compelled to speak out because of her platform.

"'Evil prospers when good men do nothing"… ain’t that the truth.

'We shouldn’t be surprised that fundamentalists, of all stripes, everywhere, are exercised and fuming.

'We shouldn’t be surprised that these profound changes come at a much steeper cost than it seems would lie true in the 20th century.

'If we live through this precarious moment — if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn't lead us to nuclear winter — we will have much to thank this president for.

'Because he will have woken us up to how fragile freedom really is.'

She said the country had been shown 'how the authority of the executive, in the hands of a self-dealer, can be wielded against the people, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights...the whip of the executive can, through a Twitter feed, lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimize the press and all of the imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability.'

To finish off her fiery attack on Trump's first few weeks in power, she said: 'All of us have the human right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

'If you think people were mad when they thought the government was coming after their guns, wait until you see when they try to take away our happiness.'

Streep, 67, was accepting the National Ally for Equality Award when she delivered the blistering attack.

Her Golden Globes speech divided the country in January.

The president reacted to Streep's speech by calling her one of the most 'over-rated actresses in Hollywood'

Streep's Golden Globes speech divided opinion. While the room of Hollywood stars at the Globes applauded her, others claimed she exemplified the elitist attitude Trump campaigned against and won in spite of

On Saturday, Streep said she wished she could 'stay at home and load the dishwasher' but that she felt compelled to use the platform her Hollywood accolades had given her

The Hollywood audience at the awards ceremony gave her a standing ovation and she was celebrated by the rest of the gliteratti online but scores said it demonstrated the elitist attitude which Trump campaigned against and won in spite of.

The president himself was unsurprisingly unimpressed. He took to Twitter to brandish her a 'Hillary flunky who lost big.'

'Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated 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 "groveling" 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,' he said.

The journalist mentioned by both Trump and Streep is Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter with arthrogryposis. He claims there is no way the president could not have known about his disability and that the pair were on a first-name basis for years.

Trump singled him out at a rally in South Carolina in 2015 where he imitated him to a laughing crowd by waving his hands around while complaining about a story he'd written.