Donald Trump Made Rosie O'Donnell and Jimmy Kimmel Unlikely Allies

Rosie O’Donnell and Jimmy Kimmel are now sharing a late-night stage, but she says they were never exactly showbiz buddies.

Ahead of guest-hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live! the week of August 17, O’Donnell told Variety that Kimmel’s offer “came out of the blue.” Kimmel had framed the booking as “a special treat” for President Donald Trump, whose decades-long feud with O’Donnell has made her one of his most familiar celebrity antagonists.

But O’Donnell said the invitation surprised her for another reason: she and Kimmel had their own history.

“We’ve never spoken on the phone; we’ve texted a few times,” O’Donnell said. “Howard Stern tried to make amends with us, so we’ve been at the same parties a few times and I would talk to his wife.”

Then she described the old dynamic more bluntly.

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

O’Donnell did not detail the source of the tension. She did, however, point to one human moment that softened it.

Kimmel’s uncle Frank Potenza, a former NYPD officer who often appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, died in 2011. O’Donnell said she reached out to Kimmel afterward.

“When everything happened with his uncle dying, I wrote him and he wrote back,” she said.

Fifteen years later, the guest-hosting offer caught her off guard.

“When my publicist called and said, ‘Do you want to guest-host Kimmel for a week?’ I said, ‘I haven’t ever even been a guest!’” O’Donnell said.

“And then I said, ‘If you’re positive that that’s an actual offer and he wants me to do it, then I most certainly will’,” she added. “I was surprised, to tell you the truth, and very thankful.”

O’Donnell told Variety she took the gig partly because she supports Kimmel amid Trump’s attacks on late-night comedy.

“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.

“And I wish that Stephen Colbert had the same kind of support when it happened to him,” she added.

O’Donnell previously defended Kimmel after ABC briefly pulled his show in 2025 over backlash to a joke about public reaction to the killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.

“This is unacceptable,” she wrote on Instagram. “f--- this fascist administration and corrupt corporate executives - bowing to the orange monster - america is no more.”