The Dictatorship
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ByI dig Shroff
During the make-up White House Correspondents’ Dinner last Friday, the President of the United States tried to take a swipe at an old foe. “Even Rosie O’Donnell reached out from Ireland,” he told the room. “She was desperate to come back to the United States and pay her respects to Donald J. Trump. But that didn’t work out, unfortunately, because nobody wanted her to come back.”
The joke wasn’t merely unfunny, it was also inaccurate. O’Donnell already came back to the country. Two nights before Trump’s speech, she opened her new comedy showwhich centers on her life and feud with Trump, at Manhattan’s Daryl Roth Theatre. On Thursday, she appeared on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”And next month, she will guest host“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Two decades and two presidential inaugurations later, Trump still hasn’t let it go – and O’Donnell hasn’t backed down.
After the 2024 presidential election, O’Donnell actually did what many Americans threatened to do – leave the country. But now she is back, and that matters – because the story was never just about O’Donnell herself. It was also about the rest of us, the people watching Trump attack her.
While co-hosting a 2006 episode of “The View,” then one of the biggest daytime platforms in America, O’Donnell said that Trump was not self-madeand was in no position to lecture anyone about morality. At the time, the landlord-turned-game show host was furiousbut the feud was tabloid fodder rather than national news.
Two decades and two presidential inaugurations later, Trump still hasn’t let it go – and O’Donnell hasn’t backed down. There were years of insults, including the 2015 primary debate where moderator Megyn Kelly asked Trump about women he’d called pigs and slobs and he cut her off with three words: “only Rosie O’Donnell.” He brought her up again in his first debate with Hillary Clinton. And on Friday, in a ballroom filled with media elite who have yet to call him out as bluntly and forcefully as O’Donnell has, Trump called her a “a sick young woman. Sick older woman, I guess now I have to say.”
The two-time president of the United States, in other words, has spent twenty years returning to the same woman. She was among the first with a national platform to publicly refuse the premise his whole life is built on, and he has never been able to get over it.
Which is what makes his threat last summer worth remembering: “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.” It wasn’t a serious legal proposal – the president cannot revoke a native-born American’s citizenship – as much as it was a MAGA theory of belonging. In threatening O’Donnell, Trump threatened to make citizenship a privilege he extends and can revoke (based on mere speech, no less). It was a warning to any critic whose passport is the only thing standing between them and a very different life and who doesn’t have O’Donnell’s resources or profile.
In the context of a twenty-year battle with the now-most-powerful man in the world, a regrouping abroad is not surrender.
Of course, there is an obvious objection to holding Rosie up as any kind of resistance example: she left. Staying carries real moral weight. Many people who have absorbed this past decade of Trump’s politics did not have an Irish grandmotheror the means to build a life somewhere else. There is something a little uncomfortable about resistance broadcast from another country, particularly when only some can afford it. But in the context of a twenty-year battle with the now-most-powerful man in the world, a regrouping abroad is not surrender.
And the impetus for her decision is crucial: “I knew, after reading Project 2025, that if Trump got in, it was time for me and my non-binary child to leave the country,” she told CNN last year. After years of being Trump’s favorite target, O’Donnell had better reason than almost anyone alive to know his obsession with settling scores and having things his way. Indeed, she knew better than much of institutional Washington, which was still reassuring itself about guardrails, norms, and adults in the room. Many institutions folded alarmingly quickly this time around: the museums, the law firms, the universities. O’Donnell did not wait for them to capitulate.
Yet she did not disappear. Now she is telling her story on her own terms, projecting Trump’s own words onto a theater wall for audiences that laugh at them instead of with them. While on Friday, the president described a broken woman pleading across the Atlantic, the actual Rosie was onstage a short train ride away, turning his words into part of her act. Twenty years after he decided she would be the punchline, she is still standing.
That is why Trump keeps coming back to O’Donnell. His campaign against her only worked if it ended with her gone or begging him for forgiveness. Personal intimidation is never only about the person being targeted. It is a warning to others: cross me and you will regret it. Too many institutions accepted that bargain. Rosie O’Donnell never did. In trying to make an example of her, Trump only made a point – and not the one he intended.
I dig Shroff
Kaivan Shroff is a senior advisor to the Institute for Education and a political commentator. He previously served on the advisory board for Dream for America, a progressive Gen Z-led non-profit. He is an alumnus of the Hillary for America digital team, holds a joint degree from Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a BA in Political Science from Brown University.
Last week, former Justice Department lawyer Liz Oyer testified in the Senate against the confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general. Then came the death threats.
Oyer oversaw the DOJ’s pardon office before President Donald Trump ousted her last year and promptly turned the office into a tool to help out his donors and political allies. She has said she was fired for refusing to restore actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights after his 2011 misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence, a claim the Trump administration has denied.
And she was a key witness urging senators to vote against confirming Blanche, who has already sought as acting attorney general to quash further inquiry into the Epstein files and drew criticism over his softball interview with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
And it seems Republicans are now fueling attacks against Oyer as they try to make Blanche the nation’s top law enforcement official.
“Hey everybody, I started getting death threats after I testified against Todd Blanche last week,” she said, showing images of expletive-riddled messages she received.
Oyer attributed the threats to dubious accusations — peddled by Missouri’s Republican senators, Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, and in conservative media — that she was basically an ally to rapists and murderers.
At the Senate hearing, the two senators homed in on President Joe Biden’s decision to commute most federal death sentences. In an effort to undermine Oyer’s credibility, Schmitt and Hawley cherry-picked examples of macabre crimes committed by some of the death row prisoners to suggest she didn’t take the crimes seriously. The attacks were reminiscent of Hawley’s attacks on current Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearing.
In her videoOyer explained that her recommendation to reassess the cases of all 40 inmates on federal death row, 37 of whom Biden spared from execution, was in keeping with the administration’s broad opposition to capital punishment. She also dispelled misinformation that commuted inmates will be ever be released from prison, adding:
Biden campaigned on a promise to end the federal death penalty. In light of that promise, some people believe it would have been more principled for Biden to commute all 40 death sentences, not 37. That would have sent a clear message that the president was categorically rejecting the death penalty — not weighing the relative value of people’s lives.
Intent on scoring political points, Hawley and a spokesperson for Schmitt doubled down on their attacks despite Oyer’s post about receiving death threats. In comments to the Columbia MissourianHawley said the “real victims” are the people hurt by those who were spared from execution. And the Schmitt spokesperson said Oyer’s “disgraceful clemency recommendations ignored the victims’ families’ concerns.”
The unavoidable irony here is that Hawley and Schmitt are hardly advocates for victims. They’re basically launching this line of attack to help Blanche — someone who has been rebuked by Epstein victims and their families.
And, of course, Hawley and Schmitt are both staunch allies of Trump’s — someone whose own clemency actions have included scores of Jan. 6 rioters who have gone on to commit assaults and sex crimes after being freed. Hawley, as you likely remember, raised a fist to the Jan. 6 horde right before the insurrection broke out, only to be later seen running for safety.
So when it comes to the topic of placating criminals, Hawley and the GOP have little credibility.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
President Donald Trump said Monday that Israel would have been “terminated” without U.S. military intervention against Iranarguing that his administration’s strikes on Tehran’s nuclear program prevented destruction to America’s closest ally in the Middle East.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One while traveling to Michigan, Trump defended the U.S. campaign against Iran, saying it fundamentally altered the balance of power in the region.
“You know who wouldn’t survive without us? Israel. Bibi’s coming, he’ll tell you,” Trump said. “If I didn’t get involved, and I didn’t blow up those nuclear, essentially, soon to be nuclear weapons to dust, Israel would have been terminated months ago.”
Later Monday, while delivering remarks at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, Trump touted the United States’ strikes in Iran, saying the U.S. had destroyed Tehran’s navy and air force, while diminishing its drone and missile manufacturing capabilities.
While he touted the U.S. military strikes on Iran as a major success, the audience was notably less enthusiastic about his remarks on the war than they were about immigration and the southern border.
Trump was in Milford to bolster support among auto workers and voters in the key battleground state by highlighting his administration’s efforts to revive domestic manufacturing, expand auto industry jobs and strengthen the economy ahead of the midterm elections.
Trump’s remarks came one day before he is scheduled to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House to discuss the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Trump said he and Netanyahu remain “pretty close” on Iran ahead of their scheduled meeting Tuesday, though he acknowledged minor differences without elaborating.
The U.S. and Iran halted attacks over the weekend, but Trump has repeatedly warned that military action could resume if the talks fail. The president told reporters Iran had reached out seeking renewed negotiations.
“Iran took a beating over the last 14 days, and they asked us very nicely, ‘Please stop. Let’s meet,’” Trump said. “If we don’t make a deal, we go back to the same thing.”
The president also brushed aside concerns raised by Netanyahu over the potential sale of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, signaling that he would not allow foreign leaders to dictate U.S. arms sales.
“Nobody tells me what we should be selling,” Trump said when asked about Netanyahu’s reported objections. He added that “Turkey’s been a tremendous ally.”
Trump first signaled earlier this month that he was open to restoring Turkey’s access to the F-35 program, reversing a policy that removed the country after it purchased Russia’s S-400 air defense system. Israel has traditionally sought to preserve its qualitative military advantage, including access to more advanced U.S. weapons systems than neighboring countries.
At the rally in Milford, Trump argued his economic agenda is fueling a manufacturing resurgence, even as many Americans continue to grapple with higher gasoline prices and other lingering economic pressures amid the war with Iran.
“I’ve done more for you than your parents,” Trump said to a crowd of autoworkers.
The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $4.11 on Monday, compared with $3.15 a year ago, according to AAA. That is an increase of 0.96 cents per gallon, or about 31%, as fuel prices remain elevated following recent volatility in global oil markets tied to the conflict.
In the latter half of the speech, Trump returned to familiar themes he often discusses on the campaign trail, including border security, crime, election integrity and foreign policy.
Jake Traylor contributed to this story.
Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at BLN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.
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