She’s Been in a Fight With Donald Trump for 20 Years. He Threatened to Revoke Her Citizenship. Now She’s Back.

Wide Angle Rosie O’Donnell Is Back in the USA The comedian fled America under Trump. She’s returned with some lessons. I’m not sure they’re the right ones. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Scaachi Koul? July 28, 20261:56 PM Bruce Glikas/Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Donald Trump has forced more than one comedian into a bout of seeming madness. How odd that the same guy who once could have run into Kathy Griffin, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert at Emmys after-parties would eventually become such a nuisance to each of their careers. All three enraged him in different ways, before and after he became president, and all three have had their livelihoods affected to varying degrees as a result. But no one is more synonymous with early Trump—New York City Trump, Apprentice Trump, the Trump who was always calling Page Six on himself—than Rosie O’Donnell. O’Donnell has had a four-decade career, but at least a few years of it have been colored by a spat she had with the owner of the Miss Universe pageant. She was a co-host of The View in 2006 and 2007, and she did a little imitation of Trump in 2006. “I just think this man is one of those snake-oil salesmen in Little House on the Prairie,” she said. “Donald, sit and spin, my friend.” O’Donnell’s comments set off a now 20-year feud between the two of them, with both fighting on social media well into Trump’s presidency. After Trump’s reelection, O’Donnell decided to move her family out of the U.S., and her old foe has since threatened to revoke her citizenship. In that time, she’s had comparatively little to say onstage or on television. But this month, she has returned to New York with a new off-Broadway one-woman show. Common Knowledge, a 75-minute production that is not quite stand-up and not quite a monologue, features O’Donnell onstage talking to the audience about her move to Ireland, her wise and wry and nonbinary autistic child, and the unbearable realization that you actually have very little figured out, even at 64. You’d be forgiven for coming to the show assuming that it might deal with Trump, as he’s the reason O’Donnell left the country to begin with. The comedian is one of the few public figures who’ve been in Trump’s direct line of attack for years and still lived (reputationally and financially, at least) to tell the tale. The crowd at her show is certainly there to engage in a little counterprotest: Any mention of the president, by either O’Donnell herself or any of the archival clips of her shown at the beginning of Common Knowledge, is met with raucous boos and jeers from the audience. This is a crowd of Gen Xers and baby boomers who’ve loved O’Donnell for a long time. To them, she seems to have become more of a freedom fighter than a comedian. Much of the crowd is, it seems, ready to hear about the lessons learned since her feud with some New York nepo baby became a feud with the president. After a brief introductory video with her greatest hits—hugging Madonna, appearing in A League of Their Own, mocking Trump—O’Donnell emerges in shiny black patent-leather shoes, dark, rich nail polish, and a well-tailored black suit, the wide lapels studded with rhinestones spelling out End ICE. The show opens in New York on St. Patrick’s Day 1973, with the death of O’Donnell’s mother. O’Donnell is just 10. “Now, I know what you’re thinking: Did I buy a ticket to the wrong fucking show?” she says to the audience after offering the heartbreaking story of her mother’s death, her father’s grief, her siblings’ loss. “I didn’t buy a ticket to Angela’s Ashes: The Musical.” Then, for good measure, she sets off a confetti gun. When her father takes her and her siblings to Ireland after the tragedy, it’s “not to talk about grief but to show us how to survive it.” This, in theory, is the life model that O’Donnell returns to decades later after Trump wins a second term and she’s still raising the youngest of her children, the now 13-year-old Clay. “I have five children adopted at birth,” she says in the show. “I took the epidural anyway.” Common Knowledge is a little clunky, a little unclear. It’s mostly about how smart and unyielding her child is; Clay is autistic, with echolalia (the precise repetition of sounds or accents) and hyperlexia (the advanced ability to read and speak). They’re adroit, serious, with a seeming total inability to lie but, more pressingly, a refusal to do so. According to O’Donnell, her child offers a guide on how to best live life: with a strong sense of self and an even stronger sense of justice. To protect her child from Trump’s influence on their lives, O’Donnell takes an exit strategy while she still can. In Ireland, it seems that Clay gets everything they need. Their school is free and well set up for autistic kids. Clay makes friends easily, even with their nonspeaking classmates. O’Donnell shows photos of the “lollipop lady” (the crossing guard) who helps Clay to and from school every day and the pharmacist who helps them receive the right medication (and who O’Donnell falsely thinks is hitting on her; to spare both of them further indignity, she uses an image of an actress to represent the pharmacist). In O’Donnell’s retelling, life got better after she left the States. It’s a nice idea, but not one the rest of us can likely replicate ourselves. “ ‘You get a choice, Ro,” O’Donnell remembers a friend telling her, “faith or fear.’ And I picked faith.” If you’re lucky enough to be able to leave the country when the president targets you, maybe faith becomes a bit more accessible. The inevitable jabs at Trump are buried in her show, like when she calls him “Mango Mussolini” or shows a few of the more than 200 paintings she did of him during the COVID-19 pandemic, his face rendered in red, teeth bared in anger, the words Traitor and He Rapes and One Fake Fuck floating around his head. (She shows a series of these paintings while “Y.M.C.A.” plays.) “I’m just an OG lesbian bitch,” she says at one point, a sentiment that feels as true as ever. But even though he’s a constant presence in the show—the reason O’Donnell returned to a place where she once learned to heal from grief—she doesn’t have any clear answers for how those of us without Irish passports should manage him. Common Knowledge isn’t exactly a victory lap or an attempt to reengage her fans through nostalgia. It’s more about a resting place O’Donnell has found during this phase of her life, while she’s raising a young child with complex needs, and while she’s waiting for who might be president next, just like the rest of us. During the week of Aug. 17, O’Donnell will return to a desk guest-hosting for Kimmel, another oft-embattled comedian whose life is steadily changing because the president doesn’t like his jokes. At her show in late July, she gives the audience a taste of her plans, which include a song set to the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain,” a performance that Trump will surely watch live on television. “All he does is cause trauma / ’Cause he’ll never be Obama / ’Cause he doesn’t have a brain,” she sings to raucous applause. How funny you find this depends on how much sage wisdom you think O’Donnell has to offer. Her presence is a pleasing reminder of a not-so-distant past when O’Donnell was a woman on daytime TV chitchatting with Elmo. She doesn’t have any new answers, nor is she pretending she does. Her return is simply a dose of nostalgia, a letter from some sort of promised land where a figure the president hates has found a measure of peace. The rest of us may not be so lucky, but it’s nice to get some good news from an old friend. Get the best of culture Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more. Comedy Donald Trump Theater