Actress-comedian Roseanne Barr praised Republican Donald Trump, blasted Democrat Hillary Clinton and expressed doubts about the American political system in a wide-ranging interview with the Hollywood Reporter this week.
“I think we would be so lucky if Trump won,’ the 67-year-old Roseanne star told THR on the eve of the California primary. “Because then it wouldn’t be Hillary.”
Barr, whose own 2012 presidential run is the subject of the new documentary Roseanne for President!, told THR that she supports Trump in the 2016 election because to her, “[Trump] is saying that the order of law matters.”
“When a president can just pass laws all on his own, that is a little bit different than what America was supposed to be about,” Barr explained. “And Trump is saying people will have to be vetted, we’ll have to have legal immigration. It’s all a scam. I mean, illegal immigration. When people come here and they get a lot of benefits that our own veterans don’t get. What’s up with that?”
Barr also reserved some sharp criticism for Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the former of which the comedian accused of being friends “with everybody that gives her any goddamn money.”
“The fact is, you don’t get to be the nominee without taking a lot of dirty money. You might be the best f*ckin’ person on earth, but if you’re hanging out with criminals who do bad things, that matters a lot,” Barr said of Clinton, who clinched the Democrat nomination on Monday.
“I like Trump because he financed his own [campaign],” she continued. “That’s the only way he could’ve gotten that nomination. Because nobody wants a president who isn’t from Yale and Harvard and in the club. ‘Cause it’s all about distribution. When you’re in the club, you’ve got people that you sell to. That’s how money changes hands, that’s how business works. If you’ve got friends there, they scratch your back and blah, blah.”
Barr is also wary of the American electoral system, telling THR that voting “doesn’t matter at all,” and if it did, “they wouldn’t let you do it.”
“If [the process] were allowed to be what it was designed to be, to elect representatives of the people, it would still be a great system,” she explained. “But I don’t think that’s possible anymore. It’s a failure of representatives. They’re just in there taking whatever money they can get and none of them represents the public! They’re gettin’ paid with public money to f— the public!”
Read the rest of Barr’s interview with THR here.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum