As a longtime critic of the US President, comedian and talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell has never shied away from expressing her vitriol and distrust towards Donald Trump.
Earlier this month, she posted a TikTok video mourning the deaths of at least 129 people in the July 4 floods in Texas, blaming Trump’s widespread cuts to environmental agencies involved in predicting major natural disasters.
“What a horror story in Texas,” O’Donnell said in the video. “And you know, when the president guts all the early warning systems and the weathering forecast abilities of the government, these are the results that we’re gonna start to see on a daily basis.”
“It’s because he put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral bill that he just signed into law,” she said. “As Republicans cheered, people will die as a result and they’ve started already.”
“Shame on him … Shame on every GOP sycophant.”
Trump responded to O’Donnell’s latest condemnation, threatening to revoke her US citizenship.
“Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship,” he wrote on Truth Social.
“She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
Since 2015, Trump has called for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and worked to increase immigration enforcement as a goal of his administration. Recently, he floated the idea of sending “homegrowns” (ie. US citizens) who disagree with the country to foreign prisons — a suggestion that even congressional allies have questioned.
Under US law, a president cannot evoke the citizenship of an American born in the US. According to constitutional experts, sending citizens to foreign prisons would violate the Constitution’s human rights protections.
O’Donnell, who was born in New York state, moved to Ireland, earlier this year after Trump was re-elected.
Over the weekend, she responded to Trump’s threat on her Instagram account, saying: “the president of the usa has always hated the fact that i see him for who he is – a criminal con man sexual abusing liar out to harm our nation to serve himself”, and saying he opposes her because she “stands in direct opposition with all he represents”.
The online back-and-forth clash between the two has been going on for years. During Trump’s first presidency in 2017, O’Donnell told W magazine that she feared whether she would be able to “live through” his presidency.
“It’s a terrifying concept, on the brink of nuclear war with a madman in charge,” she said. “And the ineptitude—the impotence of people who should be able to stop him claiming they can’t—is absolutely infuriating.”
Back in 2006, Trump had called O’Donnell a “slob”, “loser” and “disgrace.”
In March this year, O’Donnell said in a TikTok video that she would return to the US “when it is safe for all citizens to have equal rights there in America”.
In a series of Instagram posts, she blasted Trump as a “dangerous old soulless man.”
“Hey Donald – you’re rattled again? 18 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours,” O’Donnell said in one post, featuring a photo of the president posing with Jeffery Epstein.
“You call me a threat to humanity – but I’m everything you fear: a loud woman a queer woman. A mother who tells the truth an american who got out of the country b4 u set it ablaze.”
“You crave loyalty – I teach my children to question power you sell fear on golf courses – I make art about surviving trauma you lie, you steal, you degrade – I nurture, I create, I persist. You are everything that is wrong with america… I’m not yours to silence. I never was.”
In June, O’Donnell said that she believes she can be a better mother in Ireland than in the US under Trump.
“Coming to Ireland was totally a way to take care of myself and my non-binary autistic child, who’s going to need services and help and counseling and all the things that he’s [Trump is] threatening to cut in his horrible plan of the big, beautiful bill,” she said on the “Chris Cuomo Project” podcast.
O’Donnell described living with Trump’s first term while in the US “very difficult. I was very, very depressed. I was overeating. I was overdrinking.”
Last Friday, while visiting Texas after the devastating flooding, Trump defended the government’s response to the disaster, saying his agencies “did an incredible job under the circumstances.”
His administration has been facing questions about whether more could have been done to protect and notify residents before the flooding.
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