Before he left for the day, our colleague Shrai Popat reached out to Rosie O’Donnell to ask if she had any response to Donald Trump including a deepfake AI rendering of her supposedly confessing to suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in his latest attack on her on social media.
Shrai passes along this reply from O’Donnell, the comedian and former talk show host Trump has obsessively criticized in crude terms for two decades now:
double quotation mark He’s quite ill – and getting worse daily. The 25th amendment exists for exactly this reason. Remove. Impeach. Convict.
The post, which was shared by an official White House account, depicts testimonials from AI renderings of O’Donnell and five other Hollywood critics of the president – John Leguizamo, Whoopi Goldberg, Ed Norton, Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts – in which they praise an AI rendering of Trump, depicted as a doctor in a white lab coat (not red robes), for treating them.
After Trump attacked O’Donnell in the first debate of the Republican primary campaign in 2015, the comedian shared a YouTube clip of her mockery of Trump on a 2006 episode of the talk show The View, which, she said nearly a decade later, he “can’t seem to get over.”
The clip revealed that what O’Donnell did to so enrage Trump was to scoff at him for holding a press conference to announce that he would not be taking away the title of Miss USA from a young woman who was caught drinking and taking drugs at a nightclub. After doing a broad impression of Trump, O’Donnell said: “He annoys me on a multitude of levels. He’s the moral authority: left the first wife, had an affair, left the second wife, had an affair, had kids both times, but he’s the moral compass for 20-year-olds in America.”
She then went on to skewer Trump for inheriting wealth from his father and using bankruptcy laws to repeatedly bail himself out and not pay his creditors. “This is not a self-made man,” she said. “I just think that this man is like sort of one of those, you know, snake-oil salesmen,” she added.
Two decades later, as president of the United States, Trump posted the video attacking O’Donnell from the White House on Wednesday night at seven minutes to midnight.
