Rosie O’Donnell’s therapist urged her to dial down Trump obsession

Rosie O’Donnell is once again insisting President Trump is “obsessed” with her — even as her therapist has urged her to stop posting about Mr. Trump for periods of time for her own well-being.

The comedian and former “The View” host made the comments on actress Sophia Bush’s “Work in Progress” podcast, describing Mr. Trump as an “assh—e liar, megalomaniac, no social skills, no empathy, no compassion” and claiming she would have said as much to his face. She went on to theorize that Mr. Trump’s fixation on her stems from childhood, telling Bush he “grew up with girls like me — tough, probably gay Irish girls who didn’t take” disrespect from him as a kid, according to Fox News.

The therapy angle surfaced most prominently in a Washington Post profile late last year chronicling Ms. O’Donnell’s life in Ireland, where she relocated days before Mr. Trump’s second inauguration. According to that reporting, cited by Fox News, she had promised her therapist the Wednesday before Thanksgiving that she would go two days without posting about the president. The pledge collapsed within hours. A second attempt, this time for three days, fared no better.

Ms. O’Donnell expanded on her theory of the feud in a Variety interview tied to her one-woman show “Common Knowledge,” telling the outlet she believes she “trigger[s] him like a PTSD response of all his failures in his life as a kid.” In the same interview, she disclosed she has been diagnosed with major depressive disorder and said the diagnosis factored into her decision to leave the country. 

She made similar claims in a sit-down with CNN’s Jake Tapper, declaring at one point, according to the Daily Beast, “I seem to be, you know, the obsession he can’t get rid of.” NewsBusters noted Mr. Tapper let the claim go unchallenged and pressed her further on Mr. Trump’s mental fitness rather than the substance of the feud. 

The dynamic is not new. Ms. O’Donnell first made a version of the same claim in January 2007, telling ABC’s “The View” audience, “The guy, he’s obsessed with me, obviously,” per contemporaneous reporting from CBS News — nearly two decades before her latest remarks. That timeline runs counter to some recent accounts that place the original comment in 2008.

While Mr. Trump has attacked Ms. O’Donnell by name repeatedly over the years, the volume of public commentary has run in the other direction as well, with Ms. O’Donnell continuing to raise Mr. Trump’s name across podcasts, cable news, and print interviews even from Ireland.