Meryl Streep rips Trump: His 'catastrophic instinct to retaliate’ could plunge us into a 'nuclear winter'

Appearing at the Human Rights Campaign’s 2017 Greater New York Gala Dinner on Saturday night, actress Meryl Streep trained her eye on President Donald Trump, warning that his "catastrophic instinct to retaliate" could lead us to a "nuclear winter" if he's not stopped.

The actress, who wowed a Golden Globes and national television audience with a broadside at Trump just a month ago, once once again railed against the president -- without mentioning his name claims the Hollywood Reporter.

Discussing the changes that have come about in recent years, Streep said,  "Suddenly, at one point in the 20th century, for reasons I can’t possibly enumerate in my two remaining minutes, the clouds parted. Something changed. For the first time in 39,999 years, women began to be regarded as, if not equal, at least deserving of equal rights. Men and women of color demanded their equal rights. People of sexual orientation and gender identification outside the status quo also demanded equal regard under the law."

She then turned to Trump.

"Which brings us to now," she continued. "We should not be surprised that fundamentalists, of every stripe, are exercised, and fuming. We should not be surprised that these profound changes come at a steeper cost than we originally though. 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 our current leader for. He will have woken us up to how fragile freedom is."

"The whip of the executive, through a Twitter feed, can lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimize the press and imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability."

Watch a clip from the speech posted to Twitter below: