By Quentin Langley
Let us consider two people.
The first is a comedian and activist. She is Jewish and was born in the state where Donald Trump saw his biggest fall in support compared with Romney or McCain. She was a vocal supporter of "Occupy" and sought the Green Party's nomination for President in 2012. She ended up running for the Peace & Freedom Party with Cindy Sheehan as her running mate. She attacked Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, from the left, suggesting Stein was transphobic.
The second is a stay-at-home mom in a blue collar family living a small town in the Midwestern rustbelt. She's lived in the same town all her life.
Which of these two women would you suppose would be a more natural Donald Trump supporter?
It's not even close, of course. Trump's campaign was focused very heavily on small towns in the Midwest, and especially blue collar voters in those towns. Many of those voters felt left behind by economic and social changes and Trump argued that he, unlike professional politicians, was not going to neglect them.
The first of these women is Roseanne Barr. The second is Roseanne Conner, the fictional character Barr played in her eponymous sitcom.
What turned Barr from an Occupy supporter into a Trump supporter? Well, in some ways, the transformation was not that big. Bernie Sanders advocated protectionism because he too claimed that blue collar voters had been left behind. He wasn't wrong about that, and nor was Trump. Whether either of them had viable solutions for the problem is a question for another day.
But Barr advocated reeducation camps and beheading for Wall Street bankers with over $100 million. Doesn't that make her an unlikely supporter of a billionaire property developer?
Maybe Barr's recent conversion to Trumpery is all branding. Maybe she missed the gravy train of her hugely successful sitcom and wanted to bring it back. To that end, she started tweeting not her own views, but began tweeting in character as Roseanne Conner as part of a campaign to revive the series .
If so, it worked. But it worked so well that the character's tweets became ever more outrageous until Disney, parent company of ABC, pulled the plug.
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