The RNC had Chachi. The DNC had Meryl fucking Streep—a whooping, fist-pumping, star-spangled dress-rockin’ Meryl Streep, no less.
“Hillary Clinton has taken some fire over 40 years of her fight for families and children,” the Oscar-winner said during her speech. “How does she do it? That’s what I want to know. Where does she get her grit and her grace? Where do any of our female firsts, our pathbreakers, where do they find that strength?”
Weeks later, her pal and former co-star in The Bridges of Madison County gave a controversial interview to Esquire wherein he voiced his support for former reality star turned politician Donald J. Trump.
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“That’s a tough one, isn’t it? I’d have to go for Trump… you know, ’cause [Hillary’s] declared that she’s gonna follow in Obama’s footsteps,” Eastwood said. “There’s been just too much funny business on both sides of the aisle. She’s made a lot of dough out of being a politician. I gave up dough to be a politician. I’m sure that Ronald Reagan gave up dough to be a politician.”
Eastwood’s support for candidate Trump was brought up to Streep in an interview with Variety, who seemed genuinely taken aback by the news.
“I didn’t know that,” said Streep. “I’ll have to speak to him. I’ll have to correct that! I’m shocked. I really am. Because he’s more — I would have thought he would be more sensitive than that.”
The record 19-time Oscar nominee—and three-time winner—also touched on how this year’s election has brought out the worst in people, in particular at Trump’s rallies, where racial epithets are hurled, punches are thrown, and even crying babies are given the boot.
“When you get a lot of people in a group, it can go good or it can go bad in a way that [overrides] each individual person,” Streep told Variety. “The aggregate of everybody’s emotion, it’s such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people, are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up and they’re outside of themselves. They’re behaving as a larger unit, not just themselves.”
In his get-off-my-lawn Esquire chat, Eastwood, whose bit with an empty chair at the 2012 RNC left many scratching their heads, also seemed to defend Trump’s racist crusade against Judge Gonzalo Curiel, blaming it on the epidemic of “political correctness” in America.
“We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist,” said Eastwood.
This is, of course, the third time Eastwood’s called this the “pussy generation” in the pages of Esquire, a magazine known for its cologne samples. And perhaps “those things weren’t called racist” when Eastwood was growing up because he is 86 years old and grew up in the 1940s and 1950s amid segregation, female domesticity, and the U.S. government placing Japanese-Americans in internment camps, among other things.
Also… has Clint seen The Bridges of Madison County?
