‘Roseanne’ shows what the media got wrong about Trump voters
It took only a few hours for ABC and just about everyone else who was in business with Roseanne Barr to cut all ties to the comedian, saying they were shocked and outraged by her hateful tweeting. This had to be more laughable than any of the gags on her resurgent sitcom.
After all, Barr has never been anything other than what she is now: a talented and addled provocateur who will say or do almost any outrageous thing — butcher the national anthem, mock the Holocaust, run for president or prime minister of Israel — just to get people talking about her.
Sound like anyone else you might have seen on TV at any hour of the day or night?
And that, of course, was the point of bringing Roseanne’s irreverent sense of humor back to network TV. She was supposed to draw in all the same people who love President Trump, who resent all the elite consensus and political correctness and multiculturalism, and who just want someone — pardon the terminology here — to piss off all us snowflakes who watch “Silicon Valley” instead.
But then Roseanne flamed out all at once, publicly comparing a black confidante of President Obama’s to an ape (and a radical Muslim one at that).
Why? As the late New York City Mayor Ed Koch once shouted at me from a hospital bed, when I asked him to explain Rudy Giuliani’s apparent meanness: Why does the scorpion sting? It’s in his nature!
And so ABC becomes the latest media outlet to have waded into the boggiest swamp in American politics, only to reemerge shrieking in horror and running for higher ground.
You may remember a time, for instance, when you couldn’t turn on CNN without hearing the breathless exertions of a Trump apostle named Jeffrey Lord, who was supposed to speak for the unheard masses, even though none of the masses had ever heard of him.
That came to an abrupt end after he tweeted “Sieg Heil!” at a critic, not because he was a Nazi sympathizer, by any stretch, but because in his reading of history, I guess, American liberals and German Nazis were more or less interchangeable.
Look: It’s not that there’s anything wrong with ABC or CNN trying to broaden their appeal by going beyond the same old safe perspectives — I applaud that. It’s just that by trying to talk to a growing audience in American life, you can end up pandering to a dying one instead.
Ever since the 2016 election, I’ve heard people in Washington and Hollywood talk about how they need to better represent “the Trump voter.” This is, I suppose, a natural reaction to having missed something critical about where the society is headed.
The problem is that anytime you reduce a large chunk of the electorate to a label (“values voters,” “evangelicals,” “Trump voters”), you’re oversimplifying a more complicated reality.