• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 3 hours ago

With Disney’s broadcast licenses under threat by a Trumped-up FCC investigation, anti-Trump firebrand Rosie O’Donnell is guest-hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Disney-owned ABC all this week.

O’Donnell, 64, has been a vocal critic of Trump going back decades. And Trump, 80, has responded in kind over the years.

On “Kimmel,” O’Donnell can be expected to take up the anti-Trump cudgel in much the same way that Kimmel has done nightly for the better part of both of Trump’s presidential terms. 

As is customary every year, Kimmel, 58, is on a summer vacation with guest hosts filling in for him.

As a prelude to her guest-hosting stint, O’Donnell blasted Trump, Paramount CEO David Ellison and CBS News boss Bari Weiss in an interview with Variety this week.

Ellison’s takeover of CNN -- which is owned by WBD -- “would be like Fox taking over all news channels,” O’Donnell said.

“Imagine if Fox was not one outlier, and Fox was the mainstay. That’s what’s happening with Hollywood now and the Ellisons, and it’s tragic,” she said.

She implied that Ellison and Weiss are in cahoots with Trump, and then used a Nazi analogy.

“Look what’s happened to CBS News and ‘60 Minutes,’ which was the gold star of their entire network, and they blew it up,” O’Donnell said.

“This Bari Weiss person, I don’t know how she can live with herself. There are people who are sidling up to [Trump] and history will record all of their names, what they did, and who they stood next to,” she continued.

“If you’re in a room with 10 Nazis at a table and you’re the only one who’s not, there’s a pretty good chance you’re a Nazi,” she said.

O’Donnell is so worried and disgusted by the direction she feels Trump has taken the U.S. that she famously moved to Ireland in 2025 after Trump was inaugurated for a second term.

In response, Trump has threatened to revoke her United States citizenship and bar her return.

Most recently, he let her have it in his speech at the White House Correspondents Association dinner in Washington last month when he claimed she contacted him before the dinner and begged him to allow her to attend.

“I’m told that even Rosie O’Donnell reached out from Ireland,” Trump said. “She really wanted to be here to honor me.”

“She loves me very much, and she was desperate to come back to the United States and pay her respects to Donald J. Trump,” he continued.

“But that didn’t work out, unfortunately, because nobody wanted her to come back. She actually is one of the greatest sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” he said.

For her part, O’Donnell referred to Trump as “mango Mussolini” last week on Amy Poehler’s podcast “Good Hang.”

She credited his constant interest in her with reigniting her career.

“If he knew how much he was helping my career and my life, he would shut up about me because, you know, he’s a horrible creature,” O’Donnell said.

In the Variety interview, O’Donnell said she was surprised by Kimmel’s invitation to guest-host his show.

She acknowledged that she and Kimmel are not friends, and have actually had an “adversarial relationship.” For one thing, she has never been on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

“Jimmy was never a fan of mine, and it was kind of an adversarial relationship,” she told Variety. “Not that I was fighting back, but I was like, ‘OK, one of the bro guys …’,” she said.

Variety quotes Kimmel as saying he invited O’Donnell as “a special treat” for Trump.

“I was surprised [about the invitation], to tell you the truth, and very thankful,” O’Donnell said.

“I support [Kimmel] in what he’s doing with the First Amendment, and our ability as entertainers and citizens to speak out against our government that’s enshrined in the Founding Fathers’ writings about our government, so I think he’s fantastic,” she said.