Donald Trump is supposed to be dealing with war-crime investigations, collapsing narratives, and growing pressure from Congress. Instead, he’s glued to his phone at midnight, rage-posting like a man cornered. The trigger? A new wave of criticism from one of his oldest, loudest enemies: Rosie O’Donnell.

It all kicked off when Trump saw a clip from the progressive Midas Touch Network—an interview with former Attorney General Eric Holder—circulating online. Trump reposted the video to his platform, attacking Holder as an “Obama sycophant” and ranting about Democrats wanting to pack the Supreme Court and “terminate the filibuster.” Then the dam fully broke. In just one hour, Trump fired off hundreds of posts—conspiracy threads, insults, AI fantasy clips, and bizarre brain-dump ramblings that even his supporters struggled to defend.

Buried inside the storm was something more sinister than just online tantrums. As multiple outlets report, Trump and his ally Pete Hegseth are facing intense scrutiny over alleged illegal boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, where U.S. forces are accused of bombing vessels and even hitting survivors in a second strike. Critics and lawmakers are now using words like “war crimes” and demanding full audio and video of the missions. Hegseth himself went on TV bragging, “I watched it live… we knew exactly who was in that boat,” only to later try to pin responsibility on Admiral Mitch Bradley, a top commander at Southern Command.

As that scandal grows, Trump is doing what he’s done for nearly two decades whenever he feels cornered: he reaches for Rosie.

To understand how deep this obsession runs, you have to go back to December 2006. On The View, Rosie O’Donnell torched Trump for pretending to be the moral savior of Miss USA Tara Conner while living a life of serial affairs and bankruptcies. She mocked his voice, flipped her hair to imitate his comb-over, and laid him out: he left one wife, cheated with the next, had kids both times—but now wanted to be “the moral compass for 20-year-olds in America.” She called him a liar, a fraud, and a snake-oil salesman packaged as a business genius by The Apprentice.

Trump lost it.

What followed was a full-scale media war: Trump calling into Larry King from his private jet just to call Rosie “disgusting,” suggesting someone should “pick up her girlfriend,” insulting her face, her body, her career—over and over again on every outlet that would hand him a microphone. He even dragged Barbara Walters into it, falsely claiming she regretted hiring Rosie, forcing Walters to go on The View and publicly deny it.

The feud went quiet in the mainstream—but it never left Trump’s head.

In 2015, at the very first Republican primary debate, when Fox’s Megyn Kelly asked Trump about calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” he smirked and snapped: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” In 2016, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, he brought her up again, insisting she “deserved” everything he’d said about her. Years later, he was still obsessing.

Fast forward to 2025. Rosie has moved to Ireland with her child, saying she won’t return until the U.S. is safe for all citizens. Trump responds not with policy, not with leadership—but with another blast on social media, calling her a “threat to humanity” and floating the idea of revoking her citizenship. In one post, he snarls that Rosie should “remain in the wonderful country of Ireland if they want her.”

Rosie fires back with photos of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, calling herself “everything you fear—a loud woman, a queer woman, a mother who tells the truth,” saying she lives “rent free in that collapsing brain of yours.” On a podcast, she calls Trump a “cornered rat” running from the Epstein files and says plainly: “I’m the distraction. Epstein survivors are the reckoning.”

At the exact same time, Trump is posting AI videos of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “surrendering” to him, spinning fantasies about Biden using Michelle Obama to secretly pardon people, ranting about John Brennan as an “enemy of the people,” and screaming once again that the 2020 election was stolen—with zero proof.

War-crime allegations. A possible tribunal in his future. His own cognitive and physical decline now openly discussed on mainstream TV. And through it all, one woman keeps reappearing in his feed, his speeches, his grudges:

Rosie O’Donnell—the comedian who, back in 2006, simply told the truth on live TV.

Nearly 20 years later, that truth still has him erupting.