Ellen DeGeneres stepped up in support of comedic colleague Rosie O’Donnell on Sunday with an Instagram shout-out after Donald Trump threatened to revoke her citizenship.
“Good for you Rosie,” DeGeneris wrote, tagging her, alongside a screenshot of one of the scathing comebacks O’Donnell issued after Trump’s Truth Social labeling her a “threat to humanity” and declaring he was “giving serious consideration to taking away her citizenship” (which he cannot in fact do).
Trump’s threat, fueled by a near-20-year feud between the two — O’Donnell has long been an outspoken critic of his, both in and out of office — sparked a string of rebukes from his nemesis. DeGeneres displayed a post that began, “Hey Donald — you’re rattled again? Eighteen years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours.”
O’Donnell replied that far from being a threat to humanity, she was “everything you fear: a loud woman, a queer woman, a mother who tells the truth, an American who got out of the country before you set it ablaze.” She set it next to a photo of Trump with the late convicted pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, whom the president has by turns called “a terrific guy,” and distanced himself from, declaring he was “never a fan.”
The now ex-pat comedian ended with a quasi-dare and a nod to “Game of Thrones”: “You want to revoke my citizenship? Go ahead and try, King Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan. I’m not yours to silence. I never was.”
While both comedians have moved to the U.K. since the 2024 presidential election — DeGeneres to England and O’Donnell to Ireland — they have not been in direct touch, according to reports. And O’Donnell never appeared on DeGeneres’s show. The reason, O’Donnell revealed as recently as two years ago, is a hurtful remark DeGeneres made back in the 1990s.
On “Watch What Happens Live” in September 2022, O’Donnell recounted a 1990s interview DeGeneres did with CNN host Larry King in which he asked, “Whatever happened to Rosie O’Donnell? She came out as a lesbian and disappeared.”
“And Ellen said, and I’m quoting, ‘I don’t know Rosie. We’re not friends.’ ” O’Donnell told host Andy Cohen. “It hurt my feelings like a baby, and I never really got over it.”
While O’Donnell had been invited to appear on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” to promote the Showtime series “SMILF,” O’Donnell declined, she told Cohen, because they wouldn’t let her bring someone on with her. But there was no animosity, she added.
That goodwill, though hand-in-hand with ongoing distance, persisted when DeGeneres and wife Portia de Rossi left the U.S. for political reasons.
“We’re not really in each other’s worlds, and it’s been kind of awkward but you know what? I wish her the best,” O’Donnell told Us Weekly in April. “I wish that she has peace and love in her life and that she is OK.”
With News Wire Services
