Trump is thrilled that Trump-supporting "Roseanne" debuted to great ratings

Former reality-TV star Donald Trump loves a TV show with good ratings, and when its main character and star is a Trump supporter, well, that deserves a congratulatory call.

After the high-rated premiere of the “Roseanne” sitcom reboot on ABC Tuesday night, President Trump called actor Roseanne Barr with hearty congratulations.

Barr told ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday that Trump was ecstatic about the show’s great premiere and said receiving his call was “about the most exciting thing ever.”

“We talked about a lot of things. He is just happy for me,” she said. “I have known him for many years and he has done a lot of nice things for me over the years and it was just a friendly conversation about work and television and ratings.” The two-episode premiere attracted 18.2 million viewers, which, according to the Washington Post, was ABC’s best rating for an hourlong telecast since fall 2006.

The sitcom about a working-class family and their relatives returned to ABC this week 20 years after it ended a solid nine-year run that earned a primetime Emmy for its star. Barr plays the brash mom, a line worker at a plastics factory, and now a Trump supporter; and her TV sister, played by Laurie Metcalf, is a Hillary Clinton supporter who ultimately voted for Jill Stein. Barr is a Trump supporter in real life.

In the premiere episode, Roseanne and Jackie speak for the first time since the 2016 election, with Jackie in a pink pussy hat and a “Nasty Woman” T-shirt and Roseanne saying she voted for Trump because he talked about jobs and said he’d shake things up. “I know this may come as a shock to you," she tells Jackie, "but we almost lost our house because of the way things are going.”

Jackie responds, “Have you looked at the news? Because now things are worse.”

“Not on the real news,” Roseanne responds.

Barr and Trump have been friendly for years. In 2013, Trump tweeted that she “would be great” on his TV show, “Celebrity Apprentice.” Three years later, during the heat of his presidential election, Trump thanked her for her support in another tweet.

As for Barr making her character a Trump supporter, she told the New York Times that since the show is about working-class Americans, it would be an “accurate portrayal” of their political preferences.

“I just wanted to have that dialogue about families torn apart by the election and their political differences of opinion and how we handle it,” she told the Times. “I thought that this was an important thing to say at this time.”

Cover image: Roseanne Barr arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of "Roseanne" on Friday, March 23, 2018 in Burbank, California. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)