Actress Justine Bateman 'relieved' after Trump win as friends 'distance' themselves from her publicly

Justine Bateman, remembered for her work on the 1980s sitcom “Family Ties,” says she felt a profound sense of relief when President-elect Donald Trump was declared the victor in the 2024 presidential election. She shared that satisfaction with the world in a post on X that said she was “decompressing from walking on eggshells” after an “almost intolerable” and “un-American” four years under President Joe Biden.

But Bateman told The New York Post that some responded angrily or sarcastically to her honesty and that she was told, “Oh Justine, I didn’t know you were a Nazi. I did have friends say, ‘I love you, call me anytime, but I have to unfollow you’ or ‘I have to distance myself from you online, publicly,” Bateman told The Post, noting that a lot of people have told her that she is in the same league with people who are “anti-woman, anti-gay, anti, anti, anti, anti … ”

“I have been quoted publicly since 1982. You want a collection of quotes to try and support your argument that I am any of those things? Go for it, man,” the actress told The Post. “There’s so much material you can look through. And you will find nothing.

“So the fact that people have to distance themselves from me … Look, I still love them, that’s fine. But every time they do that, and I’m also talking about strangers now, they absolutely prove my point,” she says of the “cloud that has been pressing down on society” since Trump left office the last time and America has been immersed in self-censorship.

“Man, we just went ‘1984’ on ourselves,” she told The Post. “Reporting the surveillance, surveilling each other. Come on. Why? Don’t you want to relax? Do you always want to feel like you are testifying? Do you always want to feel like somebody is recording evidence that’s going to be brought into a court of law? Why do you want to live like that?”

Bateman watched the election returns from Washington, DC and she said the results brought her a kind of healing. “I was surprised to feel, physically feel, a relief in my body,” she recalled. “I didn’t realize how uncomfortable the last four years had felt until I felt that balloon deflate.”

She said it was similar to the sensation she experienced when Elon Musk bought Twitter and she felt “a little air go out … I just felt it deflate a little bit. And then I felt it really deflate when Trump was elected.”