Roseanne has been canceled, and it’s a bigger blow to Donald Trump than you think
ABC has canceled the reboot of Roseanne today, after Roseanne Barr made a racist joke on Twitter comparing former Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape. Obviously this is a big blow to Roseanne – but this is also a bigger blow to Donald Trump than you might initially think.
Roseanne was given a new version of her show for one reason: she’s an outspoken Trump supporter. Television networks have a hard time figuring out how to get Trump’s base to tune in, because how do you craft a show to appeal to such disgusting people without offending mainstream Americans? ABC figured Roseanne was the rare safe bet within Trump’s base. She became a mainstream icon before she spent decades saying racist and xenophobic things, so maybe it would all just get overlooked.
And for a few months, that worked. Roseanne’s ratings were very strong out of the gate, as Trump’s base tuned in to see their racist hero Roseanne Barr, anti-Trump people tuned in out of outrage, and everyone else tuned in just to see what all the hype was about. Everyone but Trump’s base then began gradually losing interest, and her ratings plummeted, but were still plenty strong. Roseanne seemed to think she was sufficiently bulletproof that she could go back to saying racist things. Unfortunately for her, it doesn’t work that way.
It took ABC all of about a minute and a half to cancel Roseanne today. Sure, the network is giving up the money it could have made from her show’s continued strong ratings. But it would ultimately have lost more money in the form of advertisers pulling the plug, and mainstream Americans boycotting the network’s other shows in protest. It was one of the easiest decisions ABC has probably ever made. But it was also an extraordinarily costly one. More importantly, it cemented that the decision to give a show to an openly racist Trump supporter was a mistake to begin with.
Other corporate conglomerates will learn from this. Sure, they want to tap into Donald Trump’s racist base too. But they can see how it just blew up in ABC’s face in spectacular fashion. Roseanne just blew it the rest of Trump’s bottom feeders. Corporations won’t want to bet on those types of folks going forward. Although Roseanne didn’t talk about Trump much on her show, everyone knew she was a Trump supporter, and everyone knew her show had only been rebooted because of it. Trump just lost one of his most visible and popular surrogates – and it happened in such a way that his other similar surrogates will be far less likely to be given a shot going forward.
It gets even worse for Donald Trump. Even as he says and does one racist thing after another, large chunks of his base like to pretend that there’s nothing racist about him. It allows them to root for Trump’s racist policies while pretending that they’re not racist. Trump’s detractors have called him out as a racist from day one. But some folks in the middle have never been quite sure what to make of it or whom to believe. Well, one of Trump’s most notorious surrogates just got her show canceled for making a joke about one of Obama’s black advisers being an ape. You can’t get much more blatantly racist than that. Good luck to Trump’s base when it tries to claim going forward that neither he nor they are racist.
