Jimmy Kimmel is heading out the door, and he left one parting shot on his way out.
The man who got yanked off ABC last fall over his Charlie Kirk comments just handed his microphone to one of President Donald Trump’s most relentless critics in the country.
And the timing of who Kimmel picked — and what she said just days before he picked her — is already raising eyebrows at ABC.
Kimmel announced during his monologue that he’ll be going on a two-month summer break, as he does every year. He told his audience, “I will be taking the next two months off, this time voluntarily,” which was a wink at the suspension he earned in September 2025 after his comments about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk got him pulled off the air indefinitely.
Among the guest hosts scheduled to fill in are Tiffany Haddish, Colman Domingo, Ike Barinholtz, Anthony Anderson, and Jelly Roll. But Kimmel saved the most pointed name for last.
“And as a special treat for our commander in chief, I asked one of his all-time favorites, Rosie O’Donnell, to be here to keep the hits coming,” Kimmel said.
“You’re welcome, and all I ask in return, Mr. President, is that you don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”
The crowd loved it. Whether ABC’s executives did is a different question entirely.
Just days before Kimmel made that call, O’Donnell sat down for a conversation with author and former Democrat presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. As Williamson raised concerns about the 2026 midterms, warning of what she called “an obvious rigging of this election,” O’Donnell agreed and went further. “Not only a rigging, but I think he will have some sort of crisis, whether it’s an assassination attempt or a terrorist bombing,” she said.
“There will be some catastrophic event and he will say there will be no elections. That is what I think is going to happen.”
Those words came out of the mouth of the woman ABC is about to put on broadcast television for a full week. A representative for O’Donnell confirmed she will host *Jimmy Kimmel Live!* for one week of episodes beginning in mid-August.
The feud between O’Donnell and President Trump goes back nearly twenty years. It started in 2006 after O’Donnell criticized Trump on an episode of *The View* about his decision to be lenient toward a Miss USA winner who had been accused of drug use and other bad behavior. O’Donnell said Trump is “not a self-made man” but a “snake-oil salesman on ‘Little House On The Prairie.'” Trump responded by calling O’Donnell a “real loser” and “a woman out of control.”
In the first debate of the 2016 Republican primary cycle, Megyn Kelly began asking a challenging question about the way Trump speaks about women, calling them “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.” Trump cut Kelly off to declare “only Rosie O’Donnell.” The crowd erupted. The name had become a reliable applause line.
After Trump won a second term, O’Donnell packed up and left. That feud appeared to reach new heights in early 2025 when O’Donnell revealed she had moved to Ireland, becoming one of several celebrities to leave the United States after Trump’s second election victory. O’Donnell cited the stress of Trump’s political presence and his threats to revoke her U.S. citizenship as the reason for her move.
Trump posted 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.”
O’Donnell fired back on social media. She wrote, “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.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson did not mince words when Fox News Digital asked for comment. “Rosie’s unhinged rants are a symptom of late stage TDS [Trump derangement syndrome]. She’s way too far gone. Thank goodness she’s no longer in the United States,” Jackson said.
And yet here she comes, back to American television, courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel.
The irony is hard to miss. O’Donnell said she moved to Ireland to escape the stress of Trump’s America. She fled the United States and moved to Ireland just before President Trump was inaugurated in January 2025 — and has quietly returned to the U.S. on multiple occasions after vowing she wouldn’t. “Right now, I’m in New York,” O’Donnell revealed. “But I have moved to Ireland, and that was my choice in order to keep my family and my sanity safe.”
She said she wanted to avoid the “constant barrage” of Trump. But she has spent every month since flooding TikTok with rants about him. Now she’s taking a seat behind a late-night desk on ABC to do it with a studio audience and a camera crew.
Kimmel himself knows what it costs to go too far. From September 17 through September 22, 2025, ABC and its corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, suspended production of *Jimmy Kimmel Live!* following criticism from conservatives and public pressure from Trump administration officials over Kimmel’s monologue commentary about President Donald Trump and his supporters’ reaction to the assassination of conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
The dramatic move followed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatening to take action against ABC affiliates in the wake of a Kimmel comment that many took as suggesting the Kirk shooting suspect was a MAGA Republican during his Monday monologue.
Kimmel survived that. Got his show back. And his first move heading into summer was to book Rosie O’Donnell — a woman who, just days earlier, predicted on camera that the President of the United States would stage a terrorist attack or an assassination attempt to cancel elections.
That’s not a booking decision driven by ratings. O’Donnell has been off the national television circuit for years. Her last regular hosting job was a stint on *The View* that ended over a decade ago. O’Donnell hosted her own self-titled talk show from 1996 to 2002 and served as *The View*’s moderator from 2006 to 2007 before returning briefly from 2014 to 2015. She isn’t a draw. She’s a statement.
Kimmel knows exactly what he’s doing. He framed O’Donnell’s booking as a “special treat” for Trump, making the trolling explicit. The problem is that the trolling comes attached to a woman who just told a national audience that the President plans to manufacture a national disaster to stay in power. That’s not political comedy. That’s something else.
ABC has a decision to make. The network already pulled Kimmel off the air once under pressure. The FCC’s interest in its broadcast licenses hasn’t cooled. And now the show’s summer lineup includes a guest host who recently went on record predicting a fake assassination attempt would be used to cancel American elections.
Kimmel’s parting joke was that he asked Trump’s “all-time favorite” to keep the hits coming. But the hits O’Donnell has been throwing lately aren’t jokes. They’re accusations with no evidence attached — the kind of thing that, coming from a broadcast platform, tends to get people’s attention in Washington, DC.
Whether ABC’s executives were in the loop on O’Donnell’s recent remarks before Kimmel announced her booking is not publicly known. What is known is that she said what she said, Kimmel picked her anyway, and the network is about to find out if that was a smart call.
Don’t be surprised if this summer gets loud.
Sources: Page Six, June 20, 2026; NBC News, June 22, 2026; The Washington Times, June 20, 2026; Breitbart, June 20, 2026; Mediaite, June 18, 2026; Fox News Digital, July 15, 2025; CNN Politics, July 12, 2025; Hollywood Reporter, September 17, 2025; Variety, September 17, 2025; Wikipedia, “Suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!”