Actor-comedian Norm Macdonald slammed actress Bette Midler, calling her a “racist” for insisting that President Donald Trump pays black people to pose in the background of photos at his events.
On Wednesday, Midler tweeted a photo of a Trump campaign event with the caption: “Look, there are African American men in this shot! How much did he pay them to be ‘blackground’?”
Norm Macdonald did not mince words, tweeting, “Oh, Christ. Bette’s a racist, too. Fucxk,” to his one million Twitter followers.
The Saturday Night Live alum continued to bash Midler for her statements in a series of tweets, slamming her commentary on former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken (D), who resigned after a woman named Leeann Tweeden stepped forward and accused him of kissing her without consent. A photo from 2006 also surfaced, showing Franken pretending to grope her breasts as she slept. Accusations from other women followed.
In an attempt to defend Franken and discount Tweeden’s claims, the Broadway star posted an alleged picture of Tweeden in lingerie and lamented: “Al was forced to resign, without anything resembling due process, amid HER allegations that something ‘untoward’ happened between them.”
Norm Macdonald used Midler’s tweet as an opportunity to give her a lesson on the feminist #MeToo movement, which she emphatically supports.
“Bette, if you haven’t heard, #metoo has nothing to do with due process,” he tweeted. “But you putting a picture of this women [sic] in lingerie, implying she had it coming, is truly disgusting and what rape apologists have been saying forever. Shame.”
Macdonald has been an outspoken critic of the #MeToo movement, telling The Hollywood Reporter in an interview last September that false accusations could lead to innocent people taking their own lives:
Now it’s admit wrongdoing and you’re finished. And so the only way to survive is to deny, deny, deny. That’s not healthy — that there is no forgiveness. I do think that at some point it will end with a completely innocent person of prominence sticking a gun in his head and ending it. That’s my guess.
The Doctor Dolittle star also slammed Midler over a quote she posted which read: “It is a worse evil to prefer survival to dishonor, And for the sake of staying alive, lose the reason for living.”
“Bette, for Christ’d sake, give your head a shake,” Macdonald responded. “By your ugly reasoning, the holocaust victims were “evil”. Jesus Christ. Think.”
Macdonald has largely strayed from the common narrative of his Hollywood counterparts. Following Trump’s upset victory in 2016, he predicted that Trump could become a “beloved president.”