US President Donald Trump and actress and talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell have been embroiled in an ugly, trans-Atlantic war of words in recent days, with threats of revoked citizenship and personal slurs.  

On the weekend, Trump proclaimed he might revoke O’Donnell’s US citizenship after she criticised his administration’s handling of weather forecasting following the deadly Texas floods.

“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,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Saturday (US time), invoking a deportation rationale his administration has used in attempts to remove foreign-born protesters from the US.

O’Donnell, who lives in self-imposed exile in Ireland to escape Trump’s America, fired back on Sunday, saying in an Instagram post that Trump is “everything that is wrong with America”.

“You want to revoke my citizenship? Go ahead and try, King Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan, I’m not yours to silence, I never was,” she added to the fictional Joffrey, a villainous king in Game of Thrones.

O’Donnell moved to Ireland in early 2025 after Trump began his second term in office. She has said she does not plan to return to the US “until this administration is completely finished and hopefully held accountable for their crimes against the nation”.

While the latest salvo between the pair is new, their animosity is not.

Trump’s dislike of O’Donnell is believed to date back to a 2006 incident on The View panel show.

O’Donnell, a View panellist, mocked Trump – then the owner of the Miss USA pageant – for declaring that a pageant winner would be allowed to retain her title despite a scandal around her substance use.

“He’s the moral authority?” she sarcastically commented before listing Trump’s infidelities and business struggles and concluding with: “Sit and spin, my friend!”

To emphasise her joke, O’Donnell pulled her shoulder-length hair across her head to create a mocking version of the Trumpian do. 

O’Donnell’s on-air claim that Trump had personally declared bankruptcy later became a bone of contention – while Trump’s businesses had gone bankrupt, the man himself had not, making the show vulnerable to a lawsuit.

The View host Barbara Walters issued a careful statement when she next appeared, clarifying that Trump had never personally been bankrupt. 

However, by this time the feud between Trump and O’Donnell had become news.

Trump, meanwhile, has listed all the things he claimed Walters told him about O’Donnell’s presence on the show – claims that Walters denies.

Despite O’Donnell being a marquee hire for The View, as a result of the feud, its claims and the negative publicity, she quit the show before the end of the season.

In the following years, Trump continued to speak disparagingly about O’Donnell. That included during the first debate of the 2016 US election campaign, when he was asked about referring to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals”.

“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Trump said.