With just 10 days to go until Donald Trump’s inauguration, even the president-elect’s biggest media boosters are starting to tire of his incessant Twitter habit.
Remarkably, it wasn’t Trump’s decision to label Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “head clown,” or even his bizarre tweets attacking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on a reality show he still produces that made people suggest it might be time for him to give Twitter a rest. Instead, it was his overnight screed against the “overrated” Meryl Streep.
After Streep used her lifetime achievement award acceptance speech at Sunday night’s Golden Globes to denounce Trump for mocking a disabled reporter and called on Hollywood to band together in support of a free and open press, the president-elect did exactly what everyone expected him to and woke up early to fire back on Twitter.
“Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes,” he tweeted. “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 ‘grovelling’ 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!”
More than anything else, Trump did a great job supplying some prime Monday morning material for the “dishonest media” he claims to abhor so deeply. The great Streep-Trump feud of 2017 led every morning television program, from The View to Morning Joe. The only surprise was that the hosts of those two shows agreed.
“He’s such a baby. Of course, she’s no Scott Baio, I’ll admit that. But that is his response,” The View’s Joy Behar said of Trump’s “overrated” comment. “He is supposed to be the president of the free world. He’s not there to go tit-for-tat over every little slight that goes through his thin skin.”
“She’s ‘overrated’ and she can back it up,” Whoopi Goldberg added of Streep. “You can’t say the same,” she told Trump.
Meanwhile, on Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough, who has been an on-and-off Trump supporter over the past year, had one message for the president-elect as Inauguration Day approaches: “Stop tweeting!”
“Stop tweeting about Meryl Streep,” he continued. “Stop putting words into the mouths of intel agencies. I’m serious, someone around him needs to tell him, give it a rest. Start preparing for your inauguration. Stop being so thin-skinned.”
Those words not only sounded like they could have come from Joy Behar or Whoopi Goldberg, but also echoed Vice President Joe Biden’s message to Trump before the Streep-related meltdown: “Grow up.”
Finally, while Fox & Friends happily gave Kellyanne Conway a platform to demonize Streep, even the reliably right-wing Stuart Varney on Fox Business could not bring himself to defend Trump over this one Monday morning.
“How does name-calling make America great again?” Varney’s guest Elizabeth MacDonald asked after they read his tweets aloud. “Doesn’t that undercut Mr. Trump’s agenda by responding in ways like this? I mean, he demeans himself. You cannot expect people to climb on board with agenda when your judgment is so poor in making attacks like that.”
“I got it and I think you’re right,” Varney agreed, without hesitation.
To paraphrase Omar from The Wire, “Come at the queen, you best not miss.” Trump just whiffed.
