Rosie O’Donnell, who hosted The View from 2006-2007 and then again briefly in 2014, had just one vocal defender on her former show Monday amid her ongoing feud with Donald Trump.
Ana Navarro went after Trump for threatening to revoke the O’Donnell’s citizenship, while the one host who actually shared the stage with O’Donnell—Whoopi Goldberg—and the others were notably silent on the matter.
During a discussion about Trump and his White House posting “spam”-like memes such the one depicting the president as Superman, Navarro briefly pivoted to highlight his post “picking a fight with our former View co-host, Rosie O’Donnell, threatening to take away her citizenship.”
“So, you know, the base doesn’t like Rosie. Let me just say this. This is not North Korea. This is not a monarchy,” Navarro said. “Donald Trump and no president has the authority or jurisdiction to unilaterally take anybody’s citizenship away. Rosie O’Donnell is a natural-born U.S. citizen, born here, born in Long Island in 1962. There’s very few things that a citizen can do… then they’d have to have crimes, like treason or trying to overthrow the government. So if anybody’s got to be careful, it ain’t Rosie!” she said, throwing her signature jab at Trump regarding January 6.
“And it’s got to be done in front of a judge and taken away by a judge,” Navarro continued.
Goldberg offered no comments of her own about the president’s threats against her ex-co-worker. Joy Behar, the only other current host who worked alongside O’Donnell on the show during her original run, wasn’t at the View table on Monday.
Instead, Goldberg briefly piped up during Navarro’s takedown only to ask whether she thinks Trump is trying to distract his base from the Epstein files. “Yes, this is just him saying, ‘Look at the shiny object over here.’”
Trump took his feud with O’Donnell to new heights when he posted to Truth Social over the weekend, “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.” He added that her criticism of his administration makes O’Donnell a “a Threat to Humanity,” and that she should “remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland,” where she fled the U.S. after he was elected.
She told CNN in April, “It was time for me and my non-binary child to leave the country.”
O’Donnell became a nemesis of Trump’s during her time on The View in 2006 when she rejected the idea that the now-president should be the “moral authority” on anything, considering his own sordid background. She’s called him out regularly for almost two decades since, and in response to his citizenship threats, declared him “King Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan” and “a dangerous old soulless man with dementia.”
The current View hosts have kept anti-Trump sentiment as part of its discussions, drawing his and MAGA’s ire regularly, to the point that ABC president Bob Iger reportedly instructed the hosts to tone down on their criticism. Despite the opportunity for a united front amongst View hosts past and present against the powers-that-be on Monday, Navarro was O’Donnell’s lone on-air defender.
But perhaps it should have been surprising given O’Donnell and Goldberg’s tense history.
When O’Donnell left The View for the second time in 2015, she told Entertainment Weekly, “I think we all agreed…that it was better for everyone. Whoopi really didn’t like me.” Other times she called out Goldberg in more detail, saying the host was “as mean as anyone has ever been on television to me, personally.” Goldberg has never publicly addressed O’Donnell’s accusations.
And yet, bad blood didn’t stop another of O’Donnell’s media rivals, Ellen DeGeneres, from posting in support of her over the weekend. Sharing images of O’Donnell’s response to Trump, DeGeneres, wrote, “Good for you @rosie.”
The post Only One Host of ‘The View’ Defends Rosie O’Donnell From Trump appeared first on The Daily Beast.
