Actress Sandra Bernhard on Wednesday echoed two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton saying that white women voted for President Donald Trump because of pressure from their husbands.
Bernhard, who plays Nancy in the recently revived sitcom "Roseanne," also blamed Trump’s vote totals on women "giving in" to motherhood and not "being able to think for themselves." MSNBC host Ari Melber asked Bernhard about white women voting for Trump, and she said at first she did not know how it happened.
"Can't understand it," she said. "Don't know where it comes from."
But after a few seconds, she launched into a multi-part explanation.
"I think it's a couple of issues. It's being either under the thumb of your husband—for the election, it was being so offended by Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton's legacy that you turned on her," she said.
"Or feeling inadequate, feeling like, ‘How can somebody be so educated? How could somebody have brought themselves up from their own experience and gone to the top—educated herself, fought for rights, civil rights, and equality?’ I think that's threatening to a lot of women," she added.
Melber asked what she meant by women feeling "threatened" by Hillary Clinton, and she located the problem in their feelings of inadequacy compared to her.
"A lot of women have compromised, given in, gotten married, raised their kids, and not had the luxury of being able to think for themselves," Bernhard said.
She said making that "sacrifice" harms women and their ability to be validated through their own work. She said some women who supported Trump do work, but they can still have a degree of inadequacy.
"I'm not saying none of these women work, of course they do, but there's just those little gradations in how you look at other women and the sort of feeling of inadequacy," she said.
Clinton herself made similar claims in India earlier this month when she said in an interview that her fellow white women voted mostly for Trump because they listened to their husbands.
Clinton said white women face an "ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever believes you should."
ABC’s revival of "Roseanne" premiered Tuesday, with the title character and her husband in the present day supporting Trump.