Trump Nemesis Says His ‘Innately Sexist’ Obsession Is Personal
Rosie O’Donnell bites back at the president on her return to New York.
Rosie O’Donnell is back in her home state of New York, and back taking a chunk out of Donald Trump.
The comedian-turned-talk-show-host lit into the 80-year-old president after he targeted her and other celebrities in a vicious AI Truth Social video earlier this month, posing as a “doctor” with a stethoscope treating “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—his cringey “diagnosis” for everyone who doesn’t like him.
He’s a “mediocre man with such a horrible, horrible reputation” and his election is the “worst thing that ever happened to the United States,” the Emmy and Tony-winning former co-host of The View said Friday on The View With Jake Tapper.
“I seem to be, you know, the obsession he can’t get rid of,” she declared. “He’s obsessed with Barack Obama, and I think that’s because he’s innately a racist. And he’s obsessed with me because he’s innately a sexist.”
But O’Donnell also boasted she’s in “good company” with other celebrities targeted in Trump’s post, including Whoopi Goldberg, Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts and John Leguizamo.
Rosie O’Donnell poses during the Tony Awards in New York in June.
Angelina Katsanis/REUTERS
O’Donnell was an early target of Trump, whose attacks exposed a shocking, crude level of sexism by a presidential candidate. When debate moderator Megyn Kelly raised complaints while he was campaigning for president in 2015 for calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” Trump fired back: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”
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Targeting women has since become commonplace for Trump, who repeatedly singles out female journalists and political leaders.
O’Donnell turned the tables on Trump in her interview with Tapper.
“I don’t think, Jake, that he is going to survive that long,” she said. “His demise is visible and apparent to everyone who is not willfully blind. I mean, he called [Ukraine President] Zelensky Putin” at the NATO meeting earlier this week, she noted.
“He makes the kind of mistakes that you would forgive at Thanksgiving dinner, but you would never let grandpa cut the turkey because it might be dangerous.”
She and Tapper named multiple other goof-ups by the president, including calling Iran the “Islamic Republic of Japan.”
O’Donnell didn’t let the Democratic Party off the hook, criticizing it as failing to recognize the “emergency” that the country is facing.
“It is an emergency. It’s not like fascism might come here. Fascism has already arrived,” she said.
O’Donnell moved to Ireland with her now 13-year-old child days before Trump was sworn in to office for the second time in 2025. She called the American political landscape then “heartbreaking,” and said she was “in the process” of obtaining Irish citizenship. She told Tapper on Friday that she doesn’t regret the decision.
She’s temporarily back in New York for her one-woman show Common Knowledge, about her experiences moving to Dublin.
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