“That’s your opinion,” Roseanne Barr said to a reporter who had suggested Donald Trump was a xenophobe.

Soraya Nadia McDonald, a writer for The Undefeated, had asked Barr why Roseanne Conner, the historic protagonist of Barr’s groundbreaking 1988-1997 sitcom Roseanne, would have supported Donald Trump for president when, during the show’s original run, she spoke out forthrightly against the sort of xenophobia and racism Trump seems to represent. Now, in the show’s 2018 revival (debuting in March), Roseanne Conner is a Trump supporter, while her sister Jackie is anything but, which has caused a rift between the two.

It was a good question to ask on a creative level, since tracing that evolution from an earlier iteration of Roseanne to a later one could offer at least one interpretation of why there were several voters who flipped from being Obama voters in 2012 to Trump voters in 2016, a category it’s not hard to picture Roseanne Conner falling into. (It’s worth stating that the character lives in Illinois, so her vote for Trump didn’t ultimately matter all that much in terms of the electoral college.)

But the question took on a weird metatextual significance when you consider that Barr herself is one of the president’s foremost celebrity supporters, to the degree that she says her children took her Twitter away from her so as not to have her public proclamations overshadowing the return of the show. And Barr spent almost as much time during the revival’s panel at the Television Critics Association winter press tour dodging questions about her Trump support as she did attempting to explain why her TV husband, Dan (John Goodman), is still alive in the revival even though the final season of the original show memorably killed him off (albeit offscreen).

But McDonald’s question — which I’ll remind you was about the character of Roseanne Conner and not the celebrity Roseanne Barr (though you can see where Barr would get confused) — seemed to get under Barr’s skin, just a little bit. She denied being Trump’s number one cheerleader, but she also seemed to like the way that Trump promised to “shake things up,” which led to her support for him.

“He says a lot of crazy shit,” Barr said. “I’m not a Trump apologist. There are a lot of things he’s done and said that I don’t agree with in the same way there are probably a lot of things Hillary Clinton has done and said you don’t agree with.”

Roseanne executive producer and writer Whitney Cummings attempted to jump in to explain the creative choice to make Roseanne Conner a Trump supporter by talking about speaking with the Trump supporters in her life — people who did, occasionally, feel conflicted about candidate Trump but ended up voting for him in belief that he would bring jobs back to America. Cummings felt that a desire for jobs would explain Roseanne Conner voting for Trump, even if she didn’t agree with him on everything.

But Barr leapt back in: “Speaking of racism, I’m just going to say it...” (“You sure you wanna do that?!” interrupted her TV daughter, Sara Gilbert, who’s also a producer on the show.)

Barr completed her answer by saying that a big reason she couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton had to do with Haiti, a reference to untrue claims that the Clintons raised millions of dollars for a hospital in Haiti that was never built. She also said she was glad that black unemployment is the lowest it’s been in years, presumably crediting Trump with those jobs, then concluded by saying that we need to end “hate-riotism” in America and learn how to talk to each other.

The irony of this is that the new Roseanne — absent the star’s political leanings — is a genuinely funny, thoughtful take on how white Americans who disagree strongly over the president and his views on essentially anyone who’s not a white American can find a way to talk about these issues without killing each other. The show feels reinvigorated by the political climate in a way that, say, NBC’s Will & Grace reboot just doesn’t.

Indeed, Barr’s earlier answer about why Roseanne is now straightforwardly about a Trump voter made more sense than anything she said later: “Half the people voted for Trump, and half didn’t. It’s just realistic.”

Yet in order to take in the show’s consideration of those ideas, viewers who strongly dislike Trump will have to make their way past the star’s vocal support for the president. On some level, everybody involved realizes that this could work in the show’s favor — so long as Barr herself can stay on message.

But part of the appeal of Roseanne has always been its star’s refusal to stay on message, to say what she really thinks, to call out the worst things about America where she sees them. If the new Roseanne is thinking about how dicussing politics has fractured relationships in these 2010s, it’s a dark twist that fans will now have to ask themselves whether Barr’s politics will dampen their love for the show.