Roseanne Barr’s reaction to the backlash against her show’s ties to Trump is sadly not that surprising
Barely a month after Roseanne star Sarah Gilbert announced that the show would stop mentioning Donald Trump by name, Roseanne Barr went on The Tonight Show and said she doesn’t care about the controversy. Even though the cast and creators of Roseanne want you to view it as a show about a politically divided family, many people still see it as an endorsement of Trump. Maybe that’s because Roseanne Barr, as well as her namesake character on the show, are Trump supporters, or because the president personally congratulated Barr on the show’s success. While the show’s cast, showrunners, and EPs like Whitney Cummings have been running in circles to distance the show from the president, Barr herself seems less interested in alienating Trump.
When Barr went on The Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon asked her to address the backlash to the show.
“With a big hit, come people that aren’t so happy…if you say that you’re a supporter of Donald Trump,” Fallon stated.
“Oh, yeah, people are mad about that,” Barr responded (via USA Today). “But, you know, I don’t give a fuck.”
She went on to explain why she voted for the president.
"Everybody had to choose for themselves, according to their own conscience, who they thought was the lesser of two evils," she said. "Everybody chose that, so I'm not gonna put anybody down who didn't vote like me. This is America. It’s a free country, and when you weigh it all together, I just felt like we needed a whole new thing. All the way — bottom to top.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkBbkROIzmU?start=6&feature=oembed
The thing that continues to be frustrating about Roseanne‘s politics is that the show doesn’t address Trump’s actions as president but seems to harp on the campaign myths that he would save the working class. And as journalist Jared Yates Sexton points out, “To support Trump in the way Roseanne does in the show you’d have to turn a blind eye to Trump’s many, many bigoted statements.”
Since the show promised to stop mentioning Trump by name moving forward, we’re cautiously bracing ourselves to see how the rest of this season plays out.
