Give Rosie Her Flowers
Honoring a visionary in the art of calling out Donald Trump.
Hi friends!
Today’s missive is close to my heart because Rosie O’Donnell vs. Donald Trump is probably my all-time favorite beef. I’ve tracked it since it started, way back in 2006, when I still lived in Toronto, and my best friends and I were early adopters of watching YouTube videos while we got stoned out of our minds. We need to bring back the internet as a communal experience because watching Scarlet take a tumble and having a great laugh together again would heal so many of us. And my friends and I loved Scarlet, and the leprechaun of Mobile, Alabama, and Salad Fingers, but it was a magnificent, now unsearchable compilation of Rosie and Donald trading diss tracks that led our regular rotation back then, entertaining us and keeping us warm through the long, cold winter nights one must endure to have the privilege of living in Canada.
Donald Trump is almost as hilarious as he is evil. He missed his true calling as a hacky insult comic because he has a pathological need for negative attention that would be better expressed while he shits his diaper onstage at his Vegas residency instead of in the White House while he destroys what’s left of American civility.
Rosie did not miss her calling. She’s a truth-teller and a brilliant comedian, and I have always been on her side because I grew up watching her talk show, I love her, and no human being with a working brain and a working heart should ever be team Donald — his misogyny and racism were known long before he entered the political sphere, back when he was just a myth-building New York character with a reality show (the worst kind of proto-influencer).
When this feud began, Donald Trump was merely a soundbite whore. But now, he is president AGAIN, I have been slightly unwell since he was re-elected, and Rosie had the good sense to flee the country and start fresh in Ireland. And still, an ocean between them, he had to drag her into his latest news cycle diversion.
He’s threatening to take away her citizenship in this bootleg tweet because he clearly has issues regulating his dopamine and is trying to distract from the Epstein files (I can’t). In Rosie’s own perfect words, it’s clear that after all these years, she still lives “rent-free in that collapsing brain” of his.
With great vision comes great responsibility and it’s lonely being ahead of the curve. That’s why, we must now give credit where credit is due, because my girl Rosie, she was at least a solid decade ahead of the rest of us in calling out Donald Trump’s nasty behavior, and like many artists who dare to challenge the status quo, she has paid the price for being a visionary.
As Tina Fey said about Hollywood in a TikTok of a podcast I once saw, “authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” And she is correct, if you’re trying to succeed in legacy media where the money is controlled by shareholders, old people, and gatekeepers white-knuckling what’s left. But that media ecosystem has been in flux for my entire adult life, and even though studios, television networks and the very last print magazine still offer their stamp of legitimacy and a clearer path to success (or the fantasy of a clearer path, let’s be real), we are now firmly in an era where the vanguard of culture is being created independently.
Authenticity may be dangerous and expensive, but it’s also refreshing and embraced when you speak directly to an audience that you’ve built yourself. Rosie was ahead of her time, but now she doesn’t have to fight it out in the makeup room or be live on air in a split screen to tell us what she thinks. She can speak directly to all of us on Substack or Instagram or on TikTok for ten whole minutes as she absolutely should.
Truth-telling has never been advisable and it has never been easy. To tell the truth requires bravery. To keep telling it requires grit. And to do both so brazenly, for so many years, when the trend was to kiss Donald Trump’s ass, offer him a sitcom cameo, and let him run his mouth in the tabloids, well, that requires a massive amount of trust in your own gut. And by that, most of all, I am impressed.
When I was revisiting the clip from The View that started this feud, which the show resurfaced eight years ago when he insulted her during a presidential debate, I was struck by the top comment and the amount of likes it had accrued, and so I feel it is now my duty, in the context of his social media terrorism and IRL violence, to explain why so many women are still, after all that has gone down, willing to support Donald Trump.
We live in what is known as a fuck-ass patriarchal culture. And in a fuck-ass patriarchal culture, we are socialized into obeying the dominance of men — at home, at school, in religious institutions, and through the media we consume. Let me be clear here: Patriarchy is a system of oppression, not an indictment of men. Men are also subject to its nastiness. And women are some of the system’s most loyal agents because it’s not necessarily in their best interest to liberate themselves.
When we talk about the women advocating for Trump, it’s important to remember that it’s mostly a certain type. Straight, white women are the least likely to challenge the status quo and the most likely to confuse proximity to patriarchal power for having power of their own. In the narcissistic, patriarchal world that Donald Trump inhabits and espouses, women are objects — compliant accessories or extensions of him — and so these women sidle up to his agenda and go along with their dumbass husbands because if they started thinking for themselves, horror of horrors, they could end up on their own.
Patriarchy promotes insanity.
- bell hooks
Of course, there’s the occasional Fox News outlier, but Black women, who historically have lacked access to patriarchal power by proxy, do not support him demographically and there might be, like, one lesbian who owns a MAGA hat. Because you know who’s always been on the front lines of calling out patriarchal nonsense? Outspoken gay women like Rosie O’Donnell.
I have been blessed in my life to know many a loud, queer woman, as Rosie described herself in her Instagram post responding to all of this. They are some of my dearest friends and I can tell you that while “de-centering men” is a fun pseudo-feminist TikTok trend for the straight girlies, that’s just the way lesbians naturally exist.
Does saying all of this make me sound like the anti-white, radical leftist of Ashkenazi Jewish origin that Elon Musk’s Grok AI was spewing hate speech about recently? Maybe. And what about it? Because I want to believe that what we’re living through right now is the death rattle of patriarchy, a catalyst in the collapse of the nasty systems that have already irreparably injured our planet and continue to harm most of us, while enabling men like Donald Trump to succeed even when they fail and belong in prison.
Some days I really do think that something better will dawn on the other side of this. And other days, I read the news, lose hope, and wonder if my brain will ever stop feeling like it’s trapped inside of a cement mixer.
But there is one thing that I know for sure: When it comes to calling out Donald Trump,
has always been on the right side of history. She never let fear be a muzzle and spoke the truth about him when no one else had the balls to do it for all of those years.And now? The entire world has caught up to her.
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz
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