Sometimes the boldest statement a public figure can make isn’t what they say on camera—it’s where they choose to live. Rosie O’Donnell, the 64-year-old former daytime TV host, packed up her life and relocated to Ireland with her child, Clay, after Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, and she’s not staying quiet about why.
In an interview with Page Six published on Sunday, July 12, O’Donnell explained her decision with clarity: she’d read Project 2025 and understood the implications.“I knew what they were planning and I knew if they were successful, that we were in very big trouble,”she said. There’s no hedging in that statement, no“maybe this”or“possibly that.”She saw a future she didn’t want to be part of and chose exile over resistance from home.
What started as a search for refuge became something else entirely. After settling in Howth, a village within Dublin’s heart, O’Donnell found an unexpected sanctuary. A house in Glengarry fell through due to mold—a practical problem, especially with a child who has allergies—but the pivot to Howth proved serendipitous. There’s a good school. The community welcomed them. And perhaps most importantly, there’s what O’Donnell described as a quality of kindness that“shocks me every single day.”In other words, she found what she was looking for: a functioning society that still operated on basic decency.
Then President Trump threatened to revoke her citizenship via Truth Social in July 2025, claiming she was“not in the best interests of our Great Country.”Legally speaking, a sitting U.S. president cannot do this—but the threat itself became the story. O’Donnell’s response was a sprawling Instagram post that read less like a defensive statement and more like a manifesto. She called herself everything Trump fears:“a loud woman a queer woman a mother who tells the truth an american who got out of the country bf u set it ablaze.”She contrasted their approaches—his walls versus her life-building, his fear-mongering versus her nurturing—and ended with a defiant declaration:“I’m not yours to silence i never was.”
Speaking to Page Six again, O’Donnell claimed that Trump’s support has“diminished significantly since I left,”suggesting that her departure somehow shifted the national temperature. The polling data backs up the general sentiment: his approval rating across six major polls ranges from 35 to 43 percent, with disapproval hovering between 53 and 61 percent. Whether that’s correlation or coincidence, the point seems to be that O’Donnell believes Americans have“woken up”and begun to“understand.”
What makes O’Donnell’s story different from typical celebrity hot-takes is the commitment. She didn’t just tweet her frustrations and move on. She relocated her family. She uprooted her child from the country of his birth. She chose permanent distance over proximity. That’s not clickbait activism—that’s a genuine life change born from conviction, even if you disagree with the conviction itself. In a media landscape where political statements are often performance, O’Donnell’s move reads as the real thing.
About the Author
Ava Hart
Ava Hart is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.
