Roseanne Barr’s extensive history of inflammatory political statements predates President Trump’s time in office and his campaign, but that hasn’t stopped so many in the national media from making him directly responsible for her latest controversy.
Trump’s only public comments so far on Barr’s Twitter remark about Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett resembling “Planet of the Apes” characters have been to call on Disney’s top executive to apologize to him for “horrible” things said about him on ABC. Disney is the parent company of ABC, which produced Barr’s popular show before canceling it this week.
But a news article in the New York Times published Wednesday suggested Trump should have more directly addressed Barr’s comments. “His response was not a total surprise,” it said. “Mr. Trump has reacted to other divisive events not by issuing statements of unity or moral clarity as other presidents might have done, but by finding equivalence or diverting attention.”
On the paper’s op-ed page, liberal columnist Charles Blow said Thursday Trump’s “failure to rebuke” Barr “can rightly be taken as tacit approval and acceptance.”
At the daily press briefing on Wednesday, an NBC reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders why Trump only talked about wanting an apology “instead of the underlying issue of concerns about a racist comment that [Barr] tweeted out?”
Trump did make direct contact with Barr after her show’s reboot launched earlier this year. The White House confirmed that he called her in late March to congratulate her on its ratings success. He also praised the show at a campaign-style rally in late March telling his supporters in the audience that the show “is about us.”
But that was before Barr’s insult about Jarrett, which was only the latest in Barr’s long history of incendiary political comments, much of which came well before Trump was in office or even a serious contender for president.
In 2013, Barr tweeted about “ISLAMIC RAPE PEDO CULTURE.”
She tweeted in February 2015, “I hope all the jews leave UC Davis & it then it gets nuked!”
She called Susan Rice, national security adviser to President Obama, “a man with big swinging ape balls” in late 2013.
Despite the established pattern of outrageous remarks by Barr that predate Trump’s rise to the Oval Office, Washington Post columnist Max Boot wrote Wednesday that “racists such as Barr might feel emboldened to publicly vent their hatred because they see the president doing something similar.”
Though Trump hasn’t publicly said anything directly about the nature of Barr’s tweet, Sanders said at the press briefing Wednesday that it was “inappropriate.” She added that the president in his reaction to the controversy was only commenting on “a double standard” that he said ABC had in permitting some of its guests and employees to say disparaging things about him but not about an Obama White House official.
