Rosie O'Donnell left the United States after the 2024 election, moved to Ireland, applied for Irish citizenship, and stayed away for over a year. 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 unload on President Donald Trump in an interview with Variety.
O'Donnell called the president "a conman," "a narcissist," and "a psychopath." She told Variety she remembered when Trump "was broke" and when "his planes were repossessed off the runways at LaGuardia." She claimed that anyone who grew up in New York knew what Trump was "from day one."
It was a familiar act from a familiar performer. And it landed with all the weight you'd expect from someone who abandoned her own country rather than live under a president chosen by her fellow citizens, and then crept back quietly to test whether it was "safe" to return.
O'Donnell fled the country after Trump won the 2024 election and settled in Ireland. By October 2025, she told the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph that she was applying for Irish citizenship. She told an Irish radio show, "Sunday with Miriam," that Trump "uses me as a punching bag and a way to sort of rile his base."
In February, she sat down with Chris Cuomo and revealed that she had secretly slipped back into the U.S. for two weeks to see her family.
As Fox News reported, O'Donnell told Cuomo she "wanted to make sure that it was safe" for her and her daughter to come home over the summer during her daughter's school break. She said she did not "regret leaving at all" and described the move as "what I needed to do to save myself, my child and my sanity."
So the sequence is worth laying out plainly. O'Donnell left America. She applied for foreign citizenship. She hid a brief family visit because she didn't want anyone to know she was here. And then, when the Tony Awards offered a camera and a microphone, she showed up in Manhattan to call the sitting president a psychopath.
O'Donnell's full remarks to Variety at the Tony Awards leaned on her New York roots. She told the interviewer:
"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 followed that with the line that generated the headline:
"He is a conman. He is a narcissist. And he is a psychopath if you ask me."
None of this is new material. The feud between O'Donnell and Trump spans over 20 years, dating back to her time criticizing him on "The View." What's different now is the backdrop. O'Donnell chose to leave the country. She chose to seek citizenship elsewhere. She chose to hide her return. And she chose a celebrity awards show as the venue for her reappearance, not a town hall, not a policy forum, not even a late-night interview where she might face a follow-up question.
Notice what O'Donnell did not do at the Tony Awards. She did not cite a policy she opposes. She did not name a piece of legislation. She did not point to a specific action by the administration that harmed her or anyone else. She offered personal insults dressed up as New York street wisdom.
That's the tell. For a certain class of celebrity critic, opposition to Trump has never been about governance. It's about status, social positioning, and the applause of a like-minded room. O'Donnell's comments Sunday fit that pattern perfectly. She performed outrage for an audience already predisposed to share it, at an awards ceremony, on a red carpet, surrounded by cameras.
Meanwhile, the president she called a psychopath was expected the very next day at Madison Square Garden for Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs. Trump was in New York, too. He just wasn't hiding it.
O'Donnell's public reemergence also included a separate thread about her personal life. She recently discussed guilt and shame after undergoing cosmetic surgery earlier this year, following a 50-pound weight loss. She told interviewers:
"I used to feel very strongly about facelifts. Not casually, morally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never, ever. I thought it was a betrayal. Of feminism. Of aging. Of our team of women worldwide. And then I lost 50 pounds..."
It's her life. But the pattern is worth noting: a person who held an absolutist moral position, reversed it when circumstances changed, and then asked for understanding. That's a very human thing to do. It's also exactly the kind of flexibility O'Donnell refuses to extend to anyone on the other side of the political aisle.
She can change her mind about cosmetic surgery and call it growth. But tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump are, in her telling, dupes of a conman.
O'Donnell told Chris Cuomo in February that she "just went to see my family" during her quiet return. She said she "wanted to hold my children again" and "hadn't been home in over a year." Those are genuinely sympathetic details. No one begrudges a mother missing her kids.
But O'Donnell created that separation herself. She chose Ireland. She chose to leave. She told the Daily Telegraph she was pursuing Irish citizenship. She told the Irish radio audience that Trump uses her as a punching bag. And then she returned to American soil not to reconcile with the country she left, but to call its president names at an industry gala.
The word "exile" implies something done to you. O'Donnell's departure was voluntary. Her return was strategic. And her public comments Sunday were calibrated for maximum attention with minimum accountability, no interviewer pressing back, no voter asking why she left, no obligation to explain what exactly she thinks a second Trump term has done to the country beyond offend her personally.
O'Donnell's remarks will circulate through the usual channels. They'll be clipped, shared, praised by the same people who praised her departure. They'll generate a day or two of coverage. And then the country will move on, because celebrity outbursts at awards shows do not constitute political argument.
The 79th Annual Tony Awards took place on June 7, 2026, at Radio City Music Hall. O'Donnell attended. She spoke. She insulted the president. And then, presumably, she went back to wherever she's staying, in a country she left, among people she lectures, inside a system she benefits from but refuses to respect when it produces results she dislikes.
If you want to criticize the president, stay and do the work. Run for something. Organize. Persuade. Leaving the country and then parachuting back in for a red-carpet interview is not dissent. It's theater.
And the audience for that kind of theater gets smaller every year.
