While the Conner family was talking politics on the premiere of the Roseanne revival, President Donald Trump was impressed by the reboot’s stellar ratings — and reached out to the comedian to tell her so.
After Tuesday’s episode pulled in an impressive 18.2 million viewers, even more than the original show’s finale 21 years ago, the former Apprentice star — who is known to closely track a TV show’s performance — dialed up Roseanne Barr to tell her congratulations.
“It was pretty exciting, I’ll tell you that much,” the 65-year-old actress said during a call to Good Morning America on Thursday. “They said, ‘Hold please for the President of the United States of America’ and that was about the most exciting thing ever, and it was very sweet of him to congratulate us.”
While Barr, an outspoken Trump supporter both in real life and on the show, stayed mum about the details of their chat, she said it was a “friendly” discussion.
“We just kind of had a private conversation, but we talked about a lot of things,” she said. “He’s just happy for me. I’ve known him for many years, and he’s done a lot of nice things for me over the years. It was just a friendly conversation about work and television and ratings.”
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In a separate interview with The New York Times, Barr pushed back against suggestions that as president, Trump does not embrace issues she and her character have supported, including abortion rights, same-sex marriage and organized labor.
“He has said it several times, you know, that he’s not homophobic at all,” Barr told the outlet.
Meanwhile, the president’s call to Barr prompted some Twitter users to slam Trump for the times when he failed to reach out to families of fallen soldiers, members of his administration and others.
“Next time Donald Trump doesn’t have the time to call a family of a dead US servicemen killed in action, remember that he has the time to call Roseanne Barr to congratulate her on ‘ratings,’ ” wrote one.
Another added, “This is the same guy who wouldn’t even call Rex Tillerson to tell him he was fired.”
Despite her previous stances on certain progressive causes, Barr made her namesake character a Trump supporter in the revival, a topic that causes tension with other members of the Conner family.
“The idea that people can agree to disagree is kind of missing from everything. But I think conflict resolution and agree to disagree are important things that I like to feature and talk about, and I haven’t seen much of that anywhere,” she explained on GMA. “But that’s what we need to do as a country: Figure out what we don’t like, talk to each other and discuss how we’re going to get it changed or fixed.”
The comedian added, “I really hope that it opens up civil conversation between people instead of mud-slinging. I really do because I think we need to be more civilized than that.”
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