TV Roseanne will be a Trump supporter
“Roseanne” is coming back to TV. And when it does, Roseanne Conner will be a Trump supporter.
“It’s just realistic,” Roseanne Barr said on Monday of the character she plays. “Roseanne” is, after all, a show about a working-class family. And Barr, speaking at the Television Critics Association press tour, said she believes “it was working-class people who elected Trump.”
The decision reflects Barr’s view of the world in another way: Barr’s online presence is beloved by the pro-Trump internet and its diaspora. In recent years, the comedian has gone viral among Trump supporters on a regular basis, for everything from owning liberals online to promoting conspiracy theories about Seth Rich.
Her tweets get reposted on Trump internet mainstays like the r/The_Donald subreddit, where they are approvingly upvoted thousands of times.
Although Barr recently deleted most of her past tweets, her active presence on the Trump internet has continued in the months since she first announced that “Roseanne” was coming back to TV.
“4 those who wonder-back in the day when I was called a ‘liberal’ by journalists, I used to answer-’I’m not a Liberal, I’m a radical’ & I still am-I voted Trump 2 shake up the status quo & the staid establishment.,” Barr tweeted in December, a couple days before she erased her Twitter history.
The tweet was one of a series where the comedian defended her support of Trump. She then announced plans to “retire,” prompting a small wave of news coverage. Barr later clarified that she intended to take a social media break, and not retire from acting.
The December exchange may have confused those who were tuning in to Barr’s views for the first time because of the impending revival of her TV show. However, Barr’s been tweeting pretty similar things for a while.
It’s not just Barr’s generic support of Trump that makes her a hero to the pro-Trump internet. It’s also her apparently deep knowledge of and active engagement with the memes and conspiracy theories that Only True Trump Fans Online would know.
A month earlier, Barr tweeted out a YouTube video about “Pedogate,” which essentially rehashed the 2009 arrest of a local campaign manager for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for allegations of child molestation. “Pedogate” is the umbrella term for a series of conspiracy theories that accuse powerful figures — these days, often Trump’s enemies — of being part of a secret ring of pedophiles. Pizzagate is probably the most famous iteration of that conspiracy. She’s tweeted about Pizzagate, too.
Barr has also tweeted about Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot in D.C. Despite pleas from his family, online sleuths insisted that Rich’s death was actually a political assassination attempt which was then covered up by the Clintons.
Talking about the reboot, Barr said she hoped the new “Roseanne” would address “polarization in the family and people actually hating other people for the way they voted, which I feel is not American.”