Rosie O’Donnell is dishing further on her beef with President Donald Trump.
O’Donnell attributed her Jan. 15 move to Ireland to her clash with Trump while appearing on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show on Friday (March 21), claiming that the president has had it out for her “for 20 years, when [she] told the truth about him on a program called The View.”
Noting that it was her “job to talk about pop culture [and] politics” when she was a member of the Hot Topics table, she explained, “I mentioned his bankruptcies and I mentioned all of the sexual assault charges and I mentioned that he was not, in fact, the businessman that everyone thinks he is because of the show, The Apprentice, where they sold a bunch of lies to America for over 10 years and half of America believed it.”
“And so he was very angry to say the least, and he hasn’t let it go,” she added. “And he sort of uses me as a punchline whenever he feels the need.”
O’Donnell first moderated The View from 2006 until 2007, and then returned for a brief period at the start of Season 18 in 2014. In 2006, she told The View that Trump was “not a self-made man,” describing him as a “snake-oil salesman” and saying he went bankrupt, per People. Trump had issued a statement to People at the time, saying she “will rue the words she said” and that he would “most likely sue her for making those false statements – and it’ll be fun.”
Despite O’Donnell — who has remained vocal about her distaste for Trump — no longer residing in the U.S., her name made its way into the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, where Ireland’s Prime Minister (or Taoiseach) Micheál Martin was asked by a reporter why he would let O’Donnell move to Ireland.
“I think she’s going to lower your happiness levels,” the reporter had added.
While watching the clip back on Friday night, O’Donnell said it feels “very, very surreal,” conceding to host Patrick Kielty, “He’s been doing it for two decades, and I’m still not used to it every time he does.”
“I felt very troubled that they put the Taoiseach in that position and didn’t treat him with the respect that a leader of that kind deserves when he’s visiting The White House,” she lamented, sharing that she even wrote the Taoiseach “a little note of apology to his email and got a note back that they had received it and thanked me.”
Citing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and noting Trump’s recent disbanding of the Department of Education, O’Donnell said that her child — whom she moved with — is autistic, and would “be denied services and many, many autistic children because the funding for these programs for special needs children comes from the federal government as well as the states.”
She also pointed to “the Supreme Court giving him ultimate power, the powers of a king or a monarch” as “the biggest reason” for Trump’s second term being different than his first, and more cause for her to leave the country.
O’Donnell, who said she doesn’t understand how people could “support a convicted felon, and a man who has had so many charges against him and has the moral compass of a teenage boy,” said that his presidency has been “heartbreaking” to “most of the people in America, and they’re slowly waking.”
“They’re slowly waking to realize the cuts that he’s making are not only going to affect the left-wing liberals that are woke that they are afraid of and despise, when as Jane Fonda said recently, ‘Being woke means you care about other people,’ and that’s really all that it means,” she said.