Bette(r) late than never. Bette Midler reacted to President Donald Trump’s tweet calling the singer a “washed-up psycho” on June 4, after “The Rose” star accidentally posted a fake tweet mistakenly attributed to the commander in chief. “Now I’m going to tell you a little secret,” Midler told the raucous crowd at the Javits Center in New York during her Saturday night headlining set during New York’s World Pride main event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riot.
Midler joked that she was surprised she was even invited after Trump’s harsh lambasting on Twitter. “Just two weeks ago, I was a washed-up psycho,” she quipped. “Happily, I have recovered completely, and there’s something that I learned from my president’s lunatic attack,” she added, before dropping into her beloved hit “Friends.”
“I am not alone,” she sang. “When he tweets me and derides me/ As he sits there on the throne/ At one thirty in the fucking morning/ What is he doing?… he had just had dinner with the queen. He doesn’t drink, but of course he is 73, so I’m sure he had to pee all night long. There he is sitting on the throne, got nothing better to do but call me a ‘washed-up psycho.'”
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Last month, Midler tweeted an apology for a previous statement she had erroneously attributed to Trump. “I apologize; this quote turns out to be a fake from way back in ‘15-16. Don’t know how I missed it, but it sounds SO much like him that I believed it was true!” the singer-actress wrote.
During the Pride event, produced by Jake Resnicow, Midler congratulated the audience for 50 years of “perseverance and triumph… when the status quo tries to demonize any group, it’s up to you, to us, to stand together, to resist, to make it our mission pay it forward for our brothers and sisters who still struggle for their respect and human rights.”
Watch Midler’s Pride performance below (Trump comments at 3:07 mark).