Rosie O'Donnell hadn't sat behind a late-night desk in nearly 30 years. On Monday, she took over Jimmy Kimmel Live for a night, and without ever saying Donald Trump's name, delivered a monologue that read like a victory lap over a man who has spent two decades trying to shut her up.
A Petty, Pointed Return
"They said you can't come home again, but here I am," O'Donnell told a cheering studio audience at the top of her monologue. It was a defiant line from a woman who left the United States for Dublin in January 2025, at the start of Trump's second term, and hasn't exactly kept quiet since. "If you thought the president hated Jimmy Kimmel Live when it was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, buckle up, people, buckle up!" she warned.
They said you can't come home again, but here I am.
Rosie O'Donnell
O'Donnell spent much of the set on her life abroad, describing raising her child in Ireland, a stranger-than-fiction crossing-guard mix-up over her now-gray hair, and a flirtation gone sideways with a pharmacist named Joan. She dressed the part, too: a bedazzled pink suit styled after the work of Nudie Cohn, the Ukrainian refugee tailor who defined Western show-business glamour, a detail commentators quickly flagged as its own quiet jab at a president who has made refugee and immigration policy a centerpiece of his agenda. She also paid tribute to Madonna's birthday by handing the entire audience copies of Confessions II, a callback to their shared history in A League of Their Own.
Two Decades of Bad Blood
The O'Donnell-Trump feud didn't start with his presidency. It goes back to 2006, when she criticized his business bankruptcies during her run on The View. Trump has since called her a "pig," a "slob," a "loser" and "dumb" in various public tirades, and more recently threatened in writing to revoke her U.S. citizenship, describing her as "a Threat to Humanity." This July, he posted an AI-generated deepfake video depicting her with what he called "Trump Derangement Syndrome." O'Donnell has called the ordeal a form of post-traumatic stress, saying it's "20 years of him using me as a punchline."
None of that history stopped her from getting the last word Monday night. "You know, right now he's in the White House crying because I haven't mentioned him," she said, closing out the monologue with the kind of pointed omission that says more than a direct hit would.
ABC Fires Back at the FCC
The timing wasn't incidental. Last September, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live off the air after Kimmel's comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk drew White House anger; public backlash forced the network to reverse course within days, and Kimmel came back to his largest audience in years. This spring, FCC Chair Brendan Carr opened an early review of ABC's broadcast license, widely read as another pressure tactic. On Tuesday, a day after O'Donnell's monologue aired, Disney's ABC sued the FCC directly, seeking a court order to end that early license-renewal proceeding and alleging a "retaliatory campaign."
Handing O'Donnell, of all people, the keys to Kimmel's desk in the middle of that fight was its own kind of statement from a network that spent last year visibly nervous about provoking the administration.
Our Read
A year ago, plenty of corporations were falling over themselves to appease the White House rather than risk a fight. That a broadcast giant is now suing a federal agency and platforming one of Trump's most persistent critics in the same 24 hours says less about sudden corporate courage than about a president whose approval numbers have softened enough that kowtowing looks like the riskier bet. It shouldn't have taken this long, and it shouldn't have taken his numbers dropping. But watching institutions stop flinching, even belatedly, still beats the alternative.
Sources: Queerty, LGBTQ Nation, The Advocate
Cover photo: chattingjason (Jason Chatting), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
