Gay comedian Rosie O’Donnell said she has PTSD from being Donald Trump’s target for so many years.
“It’s like a post-traumatic stress disorder for me,” she told People in an interview published Wednesday, “considering it’s been 20 years of him using me as a punchline.”
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Trump and O’Donnell’s public feud began back in 2006, when O’Donnell, who was a co-host on the daytime women’s news talk show The View, criticized Trump’s “moral compass.” In response, he referred to O’Donnell as a “woman out of control.” It spiraled from there, with Trump ultimately threatening to revoke her U.S citizenship last year because she ”is not in the best interests of our Great Country.”
O’Donnell said the way she and Donald Trump have remained intertwined for two decades would not even be believable enough for a movie.
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“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. And the fact that it’s my life is very trippy.”
O’Donnell moved to Ireland in January 2025 when Trump began his second term. In December of that year, she spoke with the Washington Post about how much she loved her life there. She said she was enjoying walks around town like a civilian and was thankful that her nonbinary child, Clay—one of five children—is thriving. She’s even got work lined up on Irish television.
In her conversation with People, she said Clay pointed out that O’Donnell has gotten “softer” since the move.
“I am softer I think as a result of being there, of the welcome that we got, and as a result of me not being constantly bombarded by news about the current president,” she said, adding that getting away “has allowed me to reclaim myself, who I was before all that went down, even though it’s very strange to have supposedly the most powerful man in the word be your arch nemesis.”
O’Donnell is spending this summer in New York City, though, as she stars in a one-woman show, Common Knowledge, which opened Wednesday. She will also guest host Jimmy Kimmel Live! starting August 17.
Earlier this month, O’Donnell called Trump “quite ill – and getting worse daily,” after he posted a deepfake AI video depicting her as a patient suffering from so-called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS), a pejorative term used by Trump supporters to dismiss any criticism of him as an irrational mental illness.
“The 25th amendment exists for exactly this reason,” O’Donnell told The Guardian. “Remove. Impeach. Convict.”
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