Joanne Rogers, Mr. Rogers’ Widow, Has Some Not-So-Neighborly Words For Trump

Everyone might be welcome in “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” but the late TV host’s widow won’t be singing the show’s famous theme song to President Donald Trump any time soon. 

“I think he’s just a horrible person,” Joanne Rogers, 92, told The Daily Beast. 

Joanne Rogers also offered up a few other descriptions for Trump that definitely would not be heard around the neighborhood, including “pathologically ill” and “mentally ill.”

Trump visited Fred Rogers’ hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania on Thursday.

Fred Rogers, who died of cancer in 2003, was famously apolitical and tried to see the good in all. Joanne Rogers told The Los Angeles Times last year that she hadn’t been especially political herself in the past. That changed when Trump entered the scene.

“And I want to vote for whoever is going to beat Trump,” she told the newspaper.

Joanne Rogers told The Daily Beast that she’d go into mourning if the president won reelection. 

“I can’t even imagine,” she said. “I would feel so badly.”

She also endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden with a compliment that Fred Rogers would appreciate. 

“I think he’s kind,” she said. “I think we all need somebody like Biden who can give us little pats on the back.”

Read her full interview here.  

Fred Rogers famously strived to see the good in anyone. Tom Junod, whose much-cited profile of Fred Rogers for Esquire in 1998 became the basis of the Tom Hanks film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” tried to take a stab at what the TV host would say about the president. 

“He would say that Donald Trump was a child once too,” Junod wrote in The Atlantic last year. “He would say that the latest Twitter victim or villain was a child once too.”