Despite a longstanding feud, Ellen DeGeneres threw her support behind fellow out comedian Rosie O’Donnell after Donald Trump threatened to take away her citizenship, calling her a “Threat to Humanity” because she doesn’t like him.
O’Donnell has been a vocal critic of Trump for decades and is known for her ability to get under his skin. The pair has traded insults for decades, with Trump constantly going after O’Donnell’s looks, calling her “fat,” a “slob,” and a “degenerate.”
Related
In a classic authoritarian move, Trump threatens to take away Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship
The media is treating this as a celebrity feud, but it’s a threat to democracy.
As Trump emerged on the political stage and continued to attack her, she plunged into a severe depression. Trump, unsurprisingly, did not care. “I think I can cure her depression,” he said. “If she stopped looking in the mirror, I think she’d stop being so depressed.”
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
And on July 12, the president of the United States decided to use his time to once again attack O’Donnell, who fled to Ireland after he was elected to a second term. He wrote on Truth Social: “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. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
O’Donnell replied with a poem on social media that included a 2006 clip of her insulting him.
“Hey Donald – you’re rattled again?” she wrote. “18 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours.”
“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 you set it ablaze.”
“You build walls – I build a life for my autistic kid in a country where decency still exists. 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 – and I’m everything you hate about what’s still right with it. You want to revoke my citizenship? Go ahead and try, King Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan.”
“I’m not yours to silence,” she said. “I never was.”
DeGeneres then reposted the poem and wrote to O’Donnell, “Good for you.” Her message is making waves since O’Donnell has been vocal about the way DeGeneres hurt her feelings in a 2004 interview on Larry King Live.
O’Donnell has spoken about the incident many times and how she has never been able to get over it. She recounted it again in 2023 to the Hollywood Reporter: “Larry King said, ‘Whatever happened to Rosie O’Donnell’s show? She went down the tubes as soon as she came out.’ And the quote that Ellen said was, ‘I don’t know Rosie. We’re not friends.’ I was watching TV in bed with my wife going, ‘Did she just say that?'”
“It would never occur to me to say ‘I don’t know her’ about somebody whose babies I held when they were born,” she continued. “It wouldn’t be in my lexicon of choices to ever say. When she was in a perplexing situation and people were saying things about her, I said, ‘Let me stand next to you and say that I’m Lebanese, too.’ When it was a downward media time for me, she didn’t do anything.”
The “Lebanese” moment she is referring to took place when DeGeneres was planning to make history by coming out on her show in 1997. O’Donnell wanted to support her by hinting about her own sexuality, as well. DeGeneres appeared as a guest on O’Donnell’s talk show, and the pair joked about being “Lebanese.”
O’Donnell told THR that almost twenty years after the Larry King interview, DeGeneres texted her apologizing and said she didn’t remember the moment.
“I remembered it so well,” she explained. “I had T-shirts printed and I gave them to my staff that said, ‘I don’t know Rosie. We’re not friends’… I knew her for so many years. It just felt like I don’t trust this person to be in my world.”
Despite O’Donnell’s feelings of betrayal, she defended DeGeneres in 2020 after dozens of people who worked both for her and on her show alleged everything from general rudeness to losing their jobs after taking medical leave and being targeted for sexual harassment by powerful and unaccountable producers.
O’Donnell has also faced allegations of using fake cheerfulness to hide darker, diva-like behavior once the cameras were turned off.
“If you have a daily show, you can’t fake your essence,” O’Donnell said. “That’s why I have compassion for Ellen. I have compassion, even though I hear the stories, and I understand.”
“I think she has some social awkwardness. It’s hard for women, period.”
In the wake of Trump’s recent threats, O’Donnell posted another poem written by Seán Watmore entitled “Rosie and The Prick.”
The poem declares that “Now he wants her passport/Now he wants her banned/All because he’s an insecure/Petty gobsh**e of a man.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.