Rosie O’Donnell packed up and moved to Ireland the moment Donald Trump returned to the White House. She’s been talking about him ever since.
Now she’s back in New York, back in front of cameras, and back with the same tired claim she’s been making for nearly two decades.
And the person who came closest to calling her out wasn’t a Trump supporter — it was her own therapist.
The Claim That Won’t Quit
O’Donnell is again claiming that President Donald Trump is “obsessed” with her, despite the fact that her own therapist has warned her to dial down her own obsession with Trump.
She appeared on actress Sophia Bush’s Work In Progress podcast to attack Trump, as she does in every video, social media post, and public appearance.
In her comments on the podcast, O’Donnell raved that Trump is an “asshole liar, megalomaniac, no social skills, no empathy, no compassion. I would have told him to his face,” and she insisted he is “obsessed” with her.
O’Donnell also insisted that Trump grew up with “tough” gay Irish women around him, and that is why he has an affinity for her.
That’s quite a theory. The man runs the most powerful country on earth and she’s out here constructing psychological profiles from a podcast studio.
O’Donnell has been making such comments for years. As far back as 2008 she said on ABC’s The View: “The guy, he’s obsessed with me, obviously.”
Eighteen years. Same line. Different podcast.
The Exile That Didn’t Stick
O’Donnell moved to Ireland with her now 13-year-old child days before Trump was sworn in to office for the second time in January 2025. She called the American political landscape then “heartbreaking,” and said she was “in the process” of obtaining Irish citizenship.
She told CNN host Jake Tapper that she left the country out of “mental health concerns” for herself and her family and does not regret the decision.
And yet here she is. Back in New York. Doing press. Talking about Trump.
O’Donnell has allowed Trump to live in her head so much that she even fled the United States for Ireland to move away from him. The distance didn’t help her one bit. The comedian has acted out many times for Trump’s attention in her self-imposed, quasi-exile.
Just in the last few weeks she told anti-Trump CNN host Jake Tapper that the president was obsessed with her. She made similar comments to Variety.
So she moved to another country to get away from someone she can’t stop talking about. That’s the situation. Make of it what you will.
She’s temporarily back in New York for her one-woman show Common Knowledge, about her experiences moving to Dublin. A show about moving to Ireland to escape Trump. Which she’s promoting by doing interviews about Trump. The irony writes itself.
What This Is Really About
The Trump-O’Donnell back-and-forth has been going on so long that it predates his first presidential campaign by a decade. While it is true that Trump has attacked O’Donnell by name many times, it is also true that O’Donnell has mentioned Trump — and her feelings about him — far more often.
But there’s something worth sitting with here. O’Donnell’s own therapist, by her own account, told her to ease up. Not a political opponent. Not a conservative commentator. Her therapist.
She went on a podcast and told that story as if it were amusing. The self-awareness required to recognize what that admission actually reveals just isn’t there.
Trump has also accused O’Donnell of being “obsessed” with him, sharing an AI-generated image that showed his image in thought bubbles above her head. She took that as more evidence of his obsession. That’s the loop she’s stuck in, and she can’t find the exit.
Hollywood has been doing this for years — treating Trump like a villain in a movie where they’re the hero, and then wondering why half the country stopped watching. O’Donnell is a particularly vivid example of how that dynamic plays out at the individual level. The more she talks, the more she proves the point she’s trying to disprove.
Trump, for his part, is running the country. He’s got a full plate. Whether he’s “obsessed” with a former daytime talk show host who moved to Dublin is a question that probably answers itself.
And the therapist? She’s still waiting for the appointment where it finally clicks.
Sources: Breitbart, The Hill, Reality Tea, The Daily Beast