Rosie O'Donnell left the country after the 2024 election, applied for Irish citizenship, and spent more than a year abroad. On Sunday she turned up at the 79th Annual Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, and used the red carpet to call the president a "conman," a "narcissist," and a "psychopath."
The 64-year-old entertainer sat for an interview with Variety at the ceremony, Fox News reported, delivering a string of personal attacks against President Donald Trump in what the network described as a rare public appearance.
It was a fitting return for a public figure who has spent the better part of two decades building a second career around opposing one man, and who, when the political winds shifted decisively against her, chose to leave the country rather than live under his administration.
O'Donnell did not hold back in her Variety interview. She invoked her New York roots to frame her criticism:
"If you grew up in New York, you knew he was an a**hole and a liar from day one. And I am 64 years old and my whole life here. So, I remember when his planes were repossessed off the runways at LaGuardia. I remember when he was broke. I remember when he would call up places and pretend to be his own publicist."
She then offered her diagnosis of the president's character:
"He is a conman. He is a narcissist. And he is a psychopath if you ask me."
O'Donnell also claimed Trump exploits their long-running feud for political purposes. "He uses me as a punching bag and a way to sort of rile his base," she said.
None of this is new territory. The O'Donnell-Trump feud stretches back more than 20 years, to when she criticized him while appearing on "The View." What makes this episode notable is not the content of her remarks, which are indistinguishable from what she has said for years, but the circumstances surrounding her return to the spotlight.
After Trump won the 2024 election, O'Donnell moved to Ireland. By October 2025, she told the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph that she was applying for Irish citizenship. She also appeared on the Irish radio show "Sunday with Miriam" to discuss Trump.
O'Donnell is far from the only celebrity who turned opposition to Trump into a defining public identity. Adam Carolla has catalogued the politicians and celebrities who abandoned their careers to obsess over the president, and O'Donnell fits the pattern as well as anyone.
In February, O'Donnell told interviewer Chris Cuomo that she had returned to the United States briefly to visit family. She described the trip in revealing terms:
"I was recently home for two weeks, and I did not really tell anyone. I just went to see my family. I wanted to see how hard it would be for me to get in and out of the country. I wanted to feel what it felt like. I wanted to hold my children again. And I hadn't been home in over a year."
She said she "wanted to make sure that it was safe." She also said she did not "regret leaving at all," describing the move to Ireland as "what I needed to do to save myself, my child and my sanity."
Consider those two statements together. O'Donnell says she does not regret leaving. She also says she wanted to test whether it was safe to re-enter her own country. She sneaked in for two weeks without telling anyone, held her children, and left again. And now she has returned for a second time, not quietly, but on a red carpet, in front of cameras, calling the president a psychopath.
O'Donnell's Tony Awards appearance fits a broader trend of public figures using high-profile platforms to attack the president. The White House itself has had to respond to some of these provocations, as when it condemned actor Mark Hamill for posting an AI-generated image of Trump in a grave.
The formula is familiar. A celebrity with a fading professional profile discovers that attacking Trump generates attention, media bookings, and social media engagement. The attacks grow more extreme over time. The celebrity's actual body of work recedes into the background, replaced by a public identity defined almost entirely by political opposition.
O'Donnell has followed this arc more completely than most. Her feud with Trump predates his political career. But the intensity of her opposition, culminating in leaving the country, has consumed whatever remained of her entertainment career. Her recent public writing has focused not on comedy or acting but on personal matters, including a Substack post in which she discussed undergoing cosmetic surgery after losing 50 pounds.
Meanwhile, organized anti-Trump activism has grown into its own industry. The progressive "No Kings" movement recently planned concerts and nationwide protests timed to the president's 80th birthday, blending celebrity culture with protest politics in ways that would have been unrecognizable a generation ago.
O'Donnell's comments raise a straightforward credibility question that the entertainment press is unlikely to ask: Why should anyone take political counsel from a person who responded to an election result by leaving the country?
She told Chris Cuomo she left to "save myself, my child and my sanity." She told the Daily Telegraph she was seeking Irish citizenship. She told Variety the president is a psychopath. Each of these statements was delivered with apparent conviction. Together, they paint a picture not of principled dissent but of someone who has lost all sense of proportion.
Trump, for his part, is expected to attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden on Monday, one day after O'Donnell's appearance at Radio City Music Hall. The contrast is hard to miss. The president attends a sporting event in New York. His longtime critic, who fled the city and the country, returns to call him names from a red carpet.
Opposition to any president is legitimate. It is a feature of American political life, not a defect. But opposition that takes the form of self-exile followed by attention-seeking public insults is something else. It is performance, not politics. And when the performer in question spent more than a year abroad because she said she did not feel safe in her own country, only to show up at the Tony Awards in a sequined gown, the performance is not even a convincing one.
The broader pattern of institutional and political clashes with the president continues across multiple fronts. A federal judge recently ordered Trump's name stripped from the Kennedy Center, and figures across the political spectrum, including Mitch McConnell in his final Senate term, have broken with the president on specific policy grounds. Those disagreements, whatever one thinks of them, at least engage with substance.
O'Donnell's contribution to the national conversation is to call the president names at an awards show. That is not courage. It is not resistance. It is a person who ran away, came back when the cameras were on, and said exactly what everyone expected her to say.
If that is the best the opposition can muster from its celebrity wing, the president's supporters have very little to worry about.