During her first major press conference for the Rosanne reboot, Roseanne Barr said that she’d make a better president than Oprah Winfrey, Susan Sarandon and “possibly even President Trump.”
“I do love Oprah. Of course I love Oprah like everybody else,” Barr said about Winfrey’s speech at the Golden Globes during a panel Monday ahead of the return of Rosanne at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour.
When asked about her personal decision to support Trump and whether she would vote for Winfrey for president, Barr said, “Actually, I think I would be a better president than Oprah or Susan Sarandon, possibly even President Trump. And I did run in 2012.”
Barr ran as the nominee of the California-based Peace and Freedom Party in 2012 and managed to take sixth place, winning more than 48,000 votes.
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Barr defended her support for Trump by saying, “I think it was time for us as a country to shake things up and try something different.”
She also explained why it was important for her to make her TV husband Dan and her character in the sitcom Trump supporters.
“I said it, and I’ll say again, my show has always been … I’ve always attempted to portray a realistic portrait of the American people and of working class people,” Barr told reporters Monday.
She continued: “And in fact, it was working class people who elected Trump, so I felt like that was very real and something that needed to be discussed especially about polarization in the family and actually hating people for the way they voted, which I feel like is not American. … There was a lot of thought in it.”
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Although the entire cast of the sitcom was present Monday, most of the questions were directed at Barr and what she and her sitcom character think of Trump.
“He says a lot of crazy sh*t. I’m not a Trump apologist. There are a lot of things that he’s said and done that I don’t agree with. There’s probably a lot of things Hillary Clinton has done and said that you don’t agree with it,” she said. “Nobody is brainwashed into agreeing with 100 per cent of what anybody said. One bright thing I read today is, this is the lowest black unemployment for many, many years, so I think that’s great. I do support jobs for people. I think that a great way to fight racism is that everybody has a job.”
One the show’s writers attempted to speak, but Barr interrupted by saying, “Speaking of racism, I’m just going to say it.”
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“Are you sure?” Sara Gilbert responded.
“A big part of why I couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton is because of Haiti,” Barr said.
An ABC publicist reportedly tried to stop the panel but Barr continued. “It’s always the lesser of two evils, and we all have to face our own conscience in how we do that…I think it’s a time to close ranks. I would really like to see an end to ‘hatriotism’ in this country,” she said.
Roseanne returns with a special hour-long premiere March 27 at 8 p.m. EST.