“There is nothing good about it, but it did its job.”
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Donald Trump Says He’s Not Surprised by Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes Speech By PATRICK HEALY
President-elect Donald J. Trump dismissed Meryl Streep as “a Hillary lover” early Monday morning after the actress, in a speech at the Golden Globes award ceremony, denounced him as a bully who disrespected and humiliated others.
Mr. Trump, in a brief telephone interview, said he had not seen Ms. Streep’s remarks or other parts of the Globes ceremony, which were broadcast on NBC, but he added that he was “not surprised” that he had come under attack from “liberal movie people.”
The Globes were the last high-profile Hollywood event before Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, a transfer of power that many in the entertainment industry have bemoaned.
While anti-Trump comments at the Globes were relatively restrained, Ms. Streep, one of the most outspoken progressives in the film world, mounted a powerful critique of Mr. Trump’s abilities as a performer, complimenting in a backhanded way a style of showmanship that she all but called insidious.
“There was one performance this year that stunned me — it sank its hooks in my heart,” Ms. Streep said. “Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth.
“It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter,” she said, referring to a speech by Mr. Trump in 2015 when he shuddered and flailed his arms, seeming to mock a disabled reporter for The New York Times. “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.”
–Excerpted from The New York Times for review purposes.
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Trump has previously claimed he was not aware that the reporter, Serge Kovaleski of the New York Times, has an impairment that visibly affects the flexibility and movement of his arms. The billionaire says that when he singled out Kovaleski for ridicule during a rally in South Carolina — “You’ve got to see this guy,” he said, before jerking his arms spastically — he did not intend to call attention to Kovaleski’s disability, arthrogryposis.
–The Washington Post
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Donald Trump is under fire again, this time for mocking a New York Times reporter that suffers from a chronic condition. CNN’s John Berman reports
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“Somebody at the financially failing and totally biased New York Times said that, over the years, I have met Mr. Kovaleski,” Trump said in a statement. “Despite having one of the all-time great memories, I certainly do not remember him.”
The Republican presidential candidate added that Kovaleski “should stop using his disability to grandstand and get back to reporting for a newspaper that is rapidly going down the tubes.”
In a story in the New York Times on Thursday, Kovaleski painted a different picture.
“Donald and I were on a first-name basis for years,” Kovaleski said. “I’ve interviewed him in his office. I’ve talked to him at press conferences. All in all, I would say around a dozen times, I’ve interacted with him as a reporter while I was at The Daily News.”
Kovaleski also tweeted, “I dispute Trump’s claim in today’s NYT.”
http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/27/media/donald-trump-serge-kovaleski-disability/index.html
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Kellyanne Conway and CNN’s Chris Cuomo discuss Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes acceptance speech, which was highly critical of President-elect Trump.
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Kovaleski issued the following written statement in response to the Trump campaign’s adoption of his report as factual basis for their candidate’s assertion that thousands of Muslims in the U.S. publicly celebrated the destruction of the World Trade Center, a claim Trump has used to support his call for the surveillance of mosques and the establishment of a registry for U.S. Muslims:[8] “I certainly do not remember anyone saying that thousands or even hundreds of people were celebrating. That was not the case, as best as I can remember.”[9]
This statement by Kovaleski prompted Trump to remark in a 25 November 2015 speech given in South Carolina, “You’ve got to see this guy: ‘Uhh, I don’t know what I said. Uhh, I don’t remember,’ he’s going like ‘I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what I said.'”[10] Trump bent his wrist severely and flailed his arms repeatedly as he spoke giving many viewers the impression that his intent was not only to ridicule the reporter’s words but also to mock the physical appearance of Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis. Trump supporters[who?] have pointed to videos of Trump employing “the same, flailing mannerisms and goofy speech … when making fun of himself during an interview with Larry King in 2005; when imitating a bank president in October [2015]; and when mocking an Army general at the same November speech in which he made the original Kovaleski comments.”[11]
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‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ host on Meryl Streep taking on Donald Trump at the Golden Globes
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The CNN anchor then asked Conway why Trump never apologized for mocking Kovaleski, one of the most notable moments in the 2016 presidential campaign that was played numerous times in anti-Trump attack ads.
“All Donald Trump then and President-elect Trump now needed to do was say, ‘Hey, look, making that gesture about Serge was wrong, and I apologize,’ and it would’ve been over,” Cuomo said. “Instead, there are these tortured attempts to say, ‘Oh, no, no, I had nothing to do with Serge.'”
Conway continued to deny that Trump mocked the reporter because of his disability — a claim that Trump himself repeated on Monday — then argued that politics should be left out of the Golden Globes altogether.
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Personal note
I am a 69 year-old paraplegic. My friend Adam Phillips reported for the Voice of America that I am a disability advocate. Guilty as charged.