Age-old grievances are the fuel for Trump's petty presidency

Last Saturday week, while most world leaders might have been contemplating matters of international diplomacy or domestic policy, Donald Trump was instead composing a social media post threatening to strip someone of their American citizenship. The target of his presidential ire? A comedian named Rosie O'Donnell who had the temerity to mock his moral authority on daytime television 18 years ago. What began as a routine celebrity spat has metastasised into something far more sinister: a demonstration of how Trump wields the machinery of state against anyone who dares to puncture his carefully constructed myth.

From this side of the Atlantic, where we've grown accustomed to a certain theatrical quality in our political discourse, the spectacle still manages to astound. The President of the United States, ostensibly occupied with matters of global significance, found time on a Saturday morning to post on Truth Social that he was giving "serious consideration" to stripping O'Donnell of her citizenship. She is, he declared, "not in the best interests of our Great Country" and "a threat to humanity".

One might reasonably wonder what apocalyptic transgression prompted such presidential ire. Had O'Donnell been caught selling state secrets? Plotting sedition? Organising a coup? No... her most recent offense is in the same vein, a scathingly critical assessment of the President, a repeated offence that has somehow sustained Trump's fury across two decades, three presidential campaigns, and countless other scandals that might have occupied a lesser man's attention.

This grudge began with what now looks like gentle ribbing. On The View in 2006, O'Donnell questioned Trump's moral authority during some Miss USA pageant dust-up. She pointed out, with admirable precision, that a man who had "left the first wife, had an affair, left the second wife, had an affair" might not be the ideal moral compass for young American women. It was hardly a revolutionary observation, but it hit its mark with surgical accuracy.

Trump's response was swift and telling. Within hours, he had embarked on a media tour that would span more than 20 interviews, deploying a lexicon of insults that revealed far more about his character than hers. O'Donnell became "fat little Rosie", "stupid", "a little clam", "unattractive", "that animal" and "a degenerate". The protestations were so excessive, so disproportionate to the original slight, that they betrayed a man whose ego was constructed of gossamer and rage.

What makes this feud particularly fascinating is how it has evolved into a kind of political prophecy. O'Donnell, speaking from her current refuge in Ireland, told RTÉ Radio that she didn't take Trump's latest threat personally, recognising herself as merely "the latest in a long list of artists, activists and celebrities to be threatened by the US President". She has become, in essence, the canary in the coalmine of American democratic discourse, a bellwether for how Trump treats those who dare to contradict him.

The comedian's relocation to Ireland following Trump's re-election has added layers of irony to this drama. O'Donnell fled here precisely to escape what she viewed as Trump's authoritarian drift, only to find herself stalked across the Atlantic by presidential threats. The absurdity writes itself: a comedy sketch stretched into a constitutional crisis, complete with a commander-in-chief who cannot resist settling personal scores on the world stage.

O'Donnell's response to Trump's latest salvo demonstrates a woman who has learned to meet bombast with precision and poise. Her Instagram riposte - "You are everything that is wrong with America" - followed by the delicious taunt about "King Jeffrey with a tangerine spray tan" shows someone who understands that the most effective weapon against a bully is often ridicule. The photograph of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein she posted alongside her response struck at exactly the right moment, while Washington buzzes with fresh demands for transparency over the Epstein files.

That Trump cannot actually follow through on his threat hardly diminishes its impact. The Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution stands as an inconvenient obstacle to presidential vengeance, protecting birthright citizenship even from commanders-in-chief nursing decades-old grudges. The Fourteenth Amendment, that inconvenient document Trump seems perpetually surprised to discover exists, explicitly protects birthright citizenship. But the impossibility of the threat is precisely the point - it reveals a president more interested in gesture than governance, more concerned with settling personal scores than serving the public interest.

What's particularly striking from an Irish perspective is how this feud illuminates the American relationship with celebrity and power. Both Trump and O'Donnell emerged from the same media ecosystem - the gladiatorial arena of American television where personalities are forged and destroyed for public entertainment. Yet their responses to criticism couldn't be more different. O'Donnell has maintained her essential humanity, using her platform to speak truth to power even when it comes at personal cost. Trump, by contrast, has weaponised his celebrity to accumulate power, then wielded that power to silence opposition.

The President's threat against O'Donnell follows a pattern that has become disturbingly familiar. Elon Musk, Zohran Mamdani, Bruce Springsteen, and Beyoncé have all found themselves in Trump's crosshairs for the crime of disagreement. What's emerging is a presidency that seems less concerned with uniting a nation than with punishing its critics. It's a style of governance that would be recognisable to any student of authoritarian history, where the state's power is deployed not to serve the people but to serve the ego of the leader.

O'Donnell's characterisation of Trump as "a dangerous old soulless man with dementia who lacks empathy, compassion, and basic humanity" may lack diplomatic finesse, but it captures something essential about this moment in American politics. Here is a president who would rather spend his time threatening comedians than addressing the genuine challenges facing his nation. The spectacle would be amusing if it weren't so fundamentally tragic.

The comedian's observation that she lives "rent-free in that collapsing brain" gets to the heart of what makes this feud so revealing. For all his bluster about making America great again, Trump remains fundamentally reactive, driven by grievances that stretch back decades. A man who cannot let go of a slight from a television talk show is unlikely to demonstrate the magnanimity required for genuine leadership.

Perhaps most tellingly, O'Donnell's response to Trump's threat was measured and proportionate. She didn't threaten him with anything more than continued opposition and the occasional well-crafted insult. In a perverse way, she has become the adult in this relationship, maintaining her dignity while he flails about with the apparatus of state power like a child with a loaded weapon.

From this comfortable distance, watching this tragicomedy unfold, one cannot help but feel a mixture of amusement and genuine concern. America, that great experiment in democratic governance, has produced a president who believes his primary enemy is a comedian who once hurt his feelings on daytime television. The threat to revoke O'Donnell's citizenship may be legally meaningless, but it's symbolically profound - a reminder that in Trump's America, the greatest crime is not corruption or incompetence, but the audacity to see the emperor's nakedness and say so out loud.

In the end, Rosie O'Donnell may have won this feud simply by maintaining her humanity in the face of institutional power wielded by a man who seems to have lost his. She remains everything he fears: authentic, unafraid, and utterly unwilling to be silenced by threats from a king who rules over a kingdom of his own wounded pride.