Roseanne Barr just learned that no one gets to be Donald Trump. Not even her. Roseanne just learned that only Trump can be Trump. He doesn't have a boss who can fire him. And there's an art to his racism that she didn't grasp.

Jason Sattler | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption 'Roseanne' canceled after 'repugnant' tweet ABC canceled its hit revival of 'Roseanne' after Roseanne Barr tweeted controversial remarks, which many saw as racist.

Roseanne Barr thought she would get away with it because she had already gotten away with it.

Even before ABC canceled her show over a racist tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett that the network called “abhorrent” and “repugnant,” she had logged a long history of embracing right-wing conspiracy theories. This wasn't even the first time she compared an African-American woman in the Obama administration to an ape.

The actress deleted a number of her more controversial tweets as she prepared to return to prime time. The surprise success of the reboot that cast her as a working-class Donald Trump supporter was positively Trumpian — except she actually won the popular vote.

On TV, Roseanne Conner is caught up in Trump’s promise of jobs and renewed patriotism. Her suspicions of the “other,” like her Muslim neighbors, are confronted and resolved. Because Trump supporters aren’t really racist, they’re just economically anxious job-loving flag-wavers who like their fellow Americans of all shades almost as much as they like walls.

On Twitter, Roseanne Barr is still the same Roseanne Barr. Like many Trump supporters, she’s well off, aging and fixated on fantasies.

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Trump fans seem to recognize that polling shows their president is unpopular and uniquely despised, but they’re willing to overlook anything to see him as a success. Possibly even democracy.

Barr’s latest obsession, and the subject of her last retweet on Twitter before she left the platform, is #QAnon, which imagines that Trump is on the verge of destroying all his enemies and crushing massive sex trafficking rings.

Though Barr claimed to be a “radical” who voted for Trump to shake up the “status quo,” her enemies just happen to be Trump’s enemies. The #QAnon fiction imagines Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Podesta and John McCain are all on their way to prison.

Meanwhile, what Barr calls the “trump-russia collusion 'theory'" is in her view "the biggest conspiracy theory of all time.” This despite special counsel Robert Mueller’s bounty of more than 100 criminal charges against 19 people so far, and the investigation goes on.

Barr, a star from the 1980s and 1990s with a penchant for conspiracies and casual racism, was the perfect TV star to carry the banner of Trumpism, which pretends to be a white working-class movement on TV while shoveling breaks of all sorts to the richest.

She could win in the ratings and win on Twitter by owning Parkland student David Hogg (whom she suggested had given a Nazi salute) and then back off without suffering any serious repercussions.

Ultimately, Barr probably thought she would keep getting away with it because Trump gets away with it. And she would have, if she had just stayed off Twitter. And she may still.

Trump doesn’t have to stay off Twitter because he doesn’t have a boss who can fire him. The Republican Congress wouldn’t impeach him if he nuked Mount Rushmore. But Trump also has an art to his racism that Barr didn’t appreciate: He’s not calling all Mexicans criminals and rapists! He said some of them might be good people! Why are you defending criminals? He’s just calling gang members “animals”!

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Trump wouldn’t say a black woman looked like “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.” He’d just continually imply Barack Obama is a Muslim and demand his birth certificate or college transcripts.

This sort of dog whistling thrills Trump’s fans, because it allows them to toy with the liberals whom they believe see racism and sexism in everything. Trump doesn't kowtow to what they see as political correctness. Instead, he allows them to enact their own form of PC that enables them to punish NFL players who don’t protest correctly or people who refuse to say "Merry Christmas." Trump gives his fans a revenge fantasy they get to live out on a daily basis.

But Roseanne learned the hard way that no one gets to be Donald, not even her.

Maybe if there’s enough money in it, another network might bring Barr back, if her cast members are willing to work with her. Having the president on your side and millions of his supporters in your audience is worth something.

However, what Barr and Trump have been selling with so much success is a fantasy that’s dying. It’s a fantasy of an America where families that look like Roseanne’s family on TV buy into a guy like Trump because he’s going to protect them from the Muslims, the immigrants, the Obama elite.

It only makes sense if you think Trump cares about anything other than himself and his kids. And that’s the greatest fantasy of all.

Jason Sattler, a writer and social media strategist based in Ann Arbor, Mich., is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and host of The Sit and Spin Room podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @LOLGOP