Rosie O’Donnell is back in the United States after moving to Ireland shortly after Trump was elected for the second stupid time. She was on the cover of People magazine, has a one-woman show called “Common Knowledge” that she’s performing on Broadway and she’s slated to guest-host Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Oh, and she still hates Trump. As one should.
The media likes to talk about Trump and O’Donnell’s “feud,” but that’s not really an accurate term. It started in 2006 when O’Donnell, in a segment about Miss USA, compared Trump to the “snake-oil salesman on ‘Little House On The Prairie’” and told him to “sit and spin” during her stint on “The View.”
“Rosie will rue the words she said. I’ll most likely sue her for making those false statements,” Trump responded, “and it’ll be fun. Rosie’s a loser. A real loser.”
It has only escalated from there. But back in 2006, Trump wasn’t the President of the United States. And once he became the president — the first and second time — he continued to go after her.
Sure, O’Donnell is a celebrity, and in the U.S., celebrities aren’t typically afforded a private life. But Trump now has power that far outweighs any jab O’Donnell could possibly make.
In 2025, he threatened to revoke her U.S. citizenship, calling her “a Threat to Humanity” who “should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her.”
According to People, O’Donnell responded on social media daring Trump to take away her citizenship. “Go ahead and try, King Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan,” she wrote.
And good for her. More people need to stand up to Trump. People like, oh I don’t know, everybody in Congress.
“If you had written this as a movie — a stand-up comic makes fun of a reality show host who is a bloviating idiot and he ends up being the president, and then he doesn’t shut up about her for 20 years — it would be unbelievable,” O’Donnell told People. “And the fact that it’s my life is very trippy.”
In one of Trump’s most recent outbursts, he posted an AI image of himself as a doctor treating O’Donnell for “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which is how Trump and his MAGA folks dismiss any criticism. (In case you’re on the fence about AI, the fact that Trump absolutely loves it should provide the proof you need that it sucks.)
“He’s quite ill,” O’Donnell said in response to Trump’s post, “and getting worse daily. The 25th amendment exists for exactly this reason. Remove. Impeach. Convict.”
Amen to that.
It will be interesting to see how O’Donnell’s hosting of Kimmel goes. No doubt Trump will have something to say about it.
As we know, Trump has incredibly thin skin and there are no norms or laws he’s worried about breaking. His threat to revoke O’Donnell’s citizenship is outrageous on the surface, but Trump very much wants to do away with birthright citizenship, one of the rare things his Supreme Court wouldn’t let him do.
Add that to an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ+ people, the crackdown on protesting and dissent, the Republican Party moving even further to the right every day, and it’s not hard to imagine that O’Donnell, one of the world’s most famous lesbians, could be in trouble. Being singled out by the president for derision is no joke — just ask Becky Pepper Jackson or any other trans kid wanting to play on a school sports team.
O’Donnell will likely be fine. I’m much more worried about the rest of us. We knew that Trump’s second term would be bad. And it’s been very bad for LGBTQ+ people. And immigrants. And women. And Black and brown people. And Muslims. And poor people. And scientists. And doctors. And farmers. And retailers. And people who buy gas. And people who eat food. And people who breathe air. Just a shitshow all around.
It’s difficult not to feel, well, very bad about the state of this country. The state of the world, even. It feels like the worst people are gobbling up all the power and the money, dousing anything they don’t care about in lighter fluid and tossing a match behind them.
But I do take some small comfort, in part, of O’Donnell’s response to Trump’s threat to her citizenship (which, it should be noted, is not something he has the power to do. Though it’s pretty clear he believes he has the power to do whatever the hell he wants).
“I’m not yours to silence,” she said. “I never was.”
And neither am I. And neither are you. We owe it to ourselves to refuse to shut up.