‘He’s quite ill – and getting worse daily’, Rosie O’Donnell tells the Guardian after Trump posts AI video attacking her
Before he left for the day, our colleague Shrai Popat reached out to Rosie O’Donnell to ask if she had any response to Donald Trump including a deepfake AI rendering of her supposedly confessing to suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in his latest attack on her on social media.
Shrai passes along this reply from O’Donnell, the comedian and former talk show host Trump has obsessively criticized in crude terms for two decades now:
He’s quite ill – and getting worse daily. The 25th amendment exists for exactly this reason. Remove. Impeach. Convict.
The post, which was shared by an official White House account, depicts testimonials from AI renderings of O’Donnell and five other Hollywood critics of the president – John Leguizamo, Whoopi Goldberg, Ed Norton, Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts – in which they praise an AI rendering of Trump, depicted as a doctor in a white lab coat (not red robes), for treating them.
After Trump attacked O’Donnell in the first debate of the Republican primary campaign in 2015, the comedian shared a YouTube clip of her mockery of Trump on a 2006 episode of the talk show The View, which, she said nearly a decade later, he “can’t seem to get over.”
The clip revealed that what O’Donnell did to so enrage Trump was to scoff at him for holding a press conference to announce that he would not be taking away the title of Miss USA from a young woman who was caught drinking and taking drugs at a nightclub. After doing a broad impression of Trump, O’Donnell said: “He annoys me on a multitude of levels. He’s the moral authority: left the first wife, had an affair, left the second wife, had an affair, had kids both times, but he’s the moral compass for 20-year-olds in America.”
She then went on to skewer Trump for inheriting wealth from his father and using bankruptcy laws to repeatedly bail himself out and not pay his creditors. “This is not a self-made man,” she said. “I just think that this man is like sort of one of those, you know, snake-oil salesmen,” she added.
Two decades later, as president of the United States, Trump posted the video attacking O’Donnell from the White House on Wednesday night at seven minutes to midnight.
Key events
US air force promises to investigate active-duty officer who called for Trump’s removal outside Congress
The US air force secretary, Troy Meink, said on Thursday that he is “aware of recent reports involving an Air Force officer protesting at the United States Capitol.”
“The Department takes allegations of misconduct seriously, including any that might undermine the nonpartisan nature of our military,” Meink added. “Pursuant to a thorough investigation – which will proceed unimpeded – commanders will ensure appropriate disposition when holding service members accountable in accordance with military law and due process.”
Meink was referring to an act of protest on the steps of the US Capitol on Wednesday by Jason Watson, an active-duty air force major, who was arrested while standing in uniform with a sign that read: “Impeach Convict Remove”.
Watson’s arrest came minutes after he had addressed a rally by the Removal Coalition, an activist group founded by a former Trump campaign operative that wants Donald Trump and JD Vance to be removed from office.
After the rally, Watson was escorted to the bottom of the steps outside the House of Representatives by congressman Al Green, a Texas Democrat who has pushed for Trump’s impeachment, video streamed on YouTube by the activist group showed.
When the congressman left, Watson was in violation of a law against protesting on the House steps without a member of Congress – a crime many hundreds of Trump supporters were not arrested for on January 6 2021.
According to a Capitol police crime summary, an officer “observed an individual holding up a sign in an area that is illegal to demonstrate. The Suspect was given multiple warnings to cease and desist their demonstration activity but failed to do so. The Suspect was placed under arrest”.
In his remarks to the rally, Watson said:
For the past 18 months, we the people have allowed the highest levels of the executive branch of the federal government to violate our constitution and their oath to it with impunity.
When the president of the United States orders military action against foreign countries absent an emergency scenario where American interests are under imminent dire threat, as was done with Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, that’s an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s authority and a violation of the war powers clause.
These violations resulted in the deaths of 13 service members and injuries of hundreds more.
For this, the president and vice president must be impeached, convicted, and removed.
Before the protest, Watson recorded a podcast interview with the Removal Coalition founder, Jessica Denson, explaining what prompted his decision to speak out.
J Oliver Conroy
Tucker Carlson, the rightwing broadcaster, wants to help build a new political party in the United States, he said in an interview – though he gave scant detail about the party, and did not indicate whether he was referring to a concrete project or merely musing.
In the same interview, Carlson dismissed the idea of running for office as part of that new party. “I don’t want to be a candidate,” he said.
Carlson, the former Fox News broadcaster turned podcast host, has made no secret of his frustration with the Trump administration and especially its war with Iran. In recent months he has expressed regret for formerly supporting Donald Trump, and just last week said that there was “no chance” he would support Republicans – or Democrats – in the midterm elections this November.
He escalated that line of thought in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published on Wednesday.
“I do know what really matters is war and finance,” he said, suggesting that pro-Israel donors had pressured Trump into attacking Iran. And “on those questions, the parties are in lockstep solidarity with each other. That’s not a democracy. That’s a one-party state posing as a democracy, and it needs to be broken, and there’s going to be a third party, and I’m going to do everything I can to bring that about.”
He added: “I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country. I mean, if you make $60,000 a year, you’re degraded. Your life expectancy has gone down, and the promise of your children’s lives is likely gone. […] I officially don’t care about Hamas. The US government should have, as its first priority, the welfare of its own people.”
Carlson, who has a habit of thinking out loud, did not elaborate. It is difficult to say if he was describing an actual project under way or just mooting the possibility. His remarks to CJR contradict an interview with the New York Times, in May, in which he said:“[T]here should be a party that is speaking for most people. Am I going to build it? Absolutely not.”
‘He’s been my friend a long time’, Trump tells CNBC viewers during softball interview with his supporter, Joe Kernen
Since he returned to the White House last year, Donald Trump’s communications team has gone to extraordinary lengths to create the illusion of transparency by having him take questions almost daily in the Oval Office, but ensuring that most of them are softballs lobbed his way by partisan media figures who support him, both more and less openly.
One of the main obstacles to maintaining the illusion, however, is the president himself, who regularly comments on just how much he likes the people who ask him questions either larded with praise for him, or that help him repeat his favorite talking points.
This dynamic was on full display on Thursday, when Trump seemed to sense that his interviewer, the conservative CNBC host Joe Kernen, seemed to get flustered.
“Just relax,” Trump told Kernan when the business channel pundit, who is not known for his grasp on basic facts of the global economy, apologized for rushing to get through his questions. “Don’t be nervous, okay?”
“I’m only in the Oval Office,” Kernen said, apparently admitting that he was overwhelmed.
“He’s been my friend for a long time, and he’s a good man too,” Trump told CNBC’s viewers, ending any pretense that this was at all adversarial.
Former special counsel Jack Smith says he is ‘very concerned of what’s going to happen in the next election’
The former special counsel Jack Smith told MSNOW on Thursday that he is “very concerned of what’s going to happen in the next election” in part because, “the people who perpetrated January 6th have probably learned from how they did that.”
Smith, who charged Donald Trump with unlawfully attempting to retain power after losing the 2020 election, and concealing and refusing to return classified documents after he left office in 2021, said “we are facing an attack on the rule of law that is different in kind and scope to anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
“My personal view is I think the state attorney generals have a tremendous role to play here. They can make sure the rule of law functions in their state”, Smith, who served as a prosecutor in the first Trump administration, said. “And I would also say that I think a thing that all of us can do is support election workers and election officials. The last time around, we saw that those people stood firm and they were, in many cases, the difference. It’s clear to me, anyways, that what I’ve seen publicly that those people are going to be put under great pressure.”
Smith also said that he was convinced that his team could have proved Trump’s guilt, on dozens of felony charges in the two cases, had the prosecution not been abandoned when he was elected to serve a second term in 2024. He added that his decision to charge the then former president was not based on political concerns, unlike the attempted prosecutions of Trump’s political enemies now.
“I think a difference between the work we did and what you’re seeing today is, in our work, there was no predetermined outcome. When I took this job. I was perfectly happy to bring this case if the facts in law warranted it or not. And I’ve done that throughout my career, and it hasn’t mattered what person’s political party was,” Smith said. “That’s how we went about our work, completely apolitical. Politics did not play a role.”
By contrast, he went on, with “what we’re seeing today, where there is a predetermined outcome.”
“I’ve seen a number of cases: James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell … there there’s not criminality here. I mean, seashells?” Smith added, in reference to the indictment of Comey, a former FBI director and deputy attorney general, for supposedly threatening Trump’s life by posting a photograph of shells on a beach arranged in the pattern “86 47”.
“So the only reasonable explanation is: the president has it out for these people, and he has people who, his former personal lawyers, who are going to do what he says regardless of the facts of law,” Smith concluded, referring to the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, who defended Trump against the charges filed by Smith by in 2023.
Smith was speaking to the MSNOW host Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative who has expressed remorse for trying to convince Americans in 2008 that Sarah Palin was ready to be president when she was a senior adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign.
‘He’s quite ill – and getting worse daily’, Rosie O’Donnell tells the Guardian after Trump posts AI video attacking her
Before he left for the day, our colleague Shrai Popat reached out to Rosie O’Donnell to ask if she had any response to Donald Trump including a deepfake AI rendering of her supposedly confessing to suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in his latest attack on her on social media.
Shrai passes along this reply from O’Donnell, the comedian and former talk show host Trump has obsessively criticized in crude terms for two decades now:
He’s quite ill – and getting worse daily. The 25th amendment exists for exactly this reason. Remove. Impeach. Convict.
The post, which was shared by an official White House account, depicts testimonials from AI renderings of O’Donnell and five other Hollywood critics of the president – John Leguizamo, Whoopi Goldberg, Ed Norton, Robert De Niro and Julia Roberts – in which they praise an AI rendering of Trump, depicted as a doctor in a white lab coat (not red robes), for treating them.
After Trump attacked O’Donnell in the first debate of the Republican primary campaign in 2015, the comedian shared a YouTube clip of her mockery of Trump on a 2006 episode of the talk show The View, which, she said nearly a decade later, he “can’t seem to get over.”
The clip revealed that what O’Donnell did to so enrage Trump was to scoff at him for holding a press conference to announce that he would not be taking away the title of Miss USA from a young woman who was caught drinking and taking drugs at a nightclub. After doing a broad impression of Trump, O’Donnell said: “He annoys me on a multitude of levels. He’s the moral authority: left the first wife, had an affair, left the second wife, had an affair, had kids both times, but he’s the moral compass for 20-year-olds in America.”
She then went on to skewer Trump for inheriting wealth from his father and using bankruptcy laws to repeatedly bail himself out and not pay his creditors. “This is not a self-made man,” she said. “I just think that this man is like sort of one of those, you know, snake-oil salesmen,” she added.
Two decades later, as president of the United States, Trump posted the video attacking O’Donnell from the White House on Wednesday night at seven minutes to midnight.
‘Davey Hearn is innocent’, former Olympian’s lawyers say of ‘outrageous’ charge over touching reflecting pool lining
Two prominent Washington lawyers have denounced the indictment of their client, the former US Olympian Davey Hearn, for allegedly destroying government property by reaching into the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to feel a piece of the new lining that peeled away within days of being applied.
Hearn’s lawyers include Norm Eisen, a former Obama administration ethics and government reform adviser, and Mary Dohrmann, a former federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia who charged rioters for attacking the Capitol on January 6 and then worked for special counsel Jack Smith.
“Davey Hearn is innocent,” his lawyers wrote. “These charges are outrageous and should be alarming to every American. This indictment reflects the administration’s effort to shift blame for their own failures. On the eve of our nation’s Independence Day, Americans should be deeply concerned by the misuse of government power against an ordinary citizen based on a concocted narrative. The justice system exists to determine facts, not to provide political cover.”
Hearn’s legal team, drawn from two non-profits, Democracy Defenders Fund and the Washington Litigation Group, issued the statement after a grand jury alleged that Hearn “maliciously did injure, break and destroy certain property, that is, lining material of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, property of the United States government, causing damage in the amount of $1000 or more.”
US attorney for DC announces charge against Olympian canoeist
At a press conference on Thursday, US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro announced the single felony charge against David Hearn after he reached into the reflecting pool last month.
“Today is about accountability for damaging a national resource, a national treasure,” she said, adding that the Olympian “forcefully and violently” pulled up and removed the bottom liner in the reflecting pool.
Pirro alleged that Hearn “damaged approximately two square feet of sealant from the bottom of the pool” and his behavior was characterized by witnesses as “belligerent, rude, and disrespectful,” according to National Park Service employees that witnessed the event.
The US attorney claimed that the damage totalled more than $1,000.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
-
A three-time US Olympian and canoeist has been indicted by a grand jury in Washington DC after reaching into the reflecting pool, according to a report by CNN, citing a source familiar with the charges. David Hearn was arrested last month on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property, after noticing a partly detached piece of the blue liner and reaching into the water to see what it felt like.
-
On Thursday, Trump posted his latest AI-generated video – a deepfake clip that portrays him as a doctor talking about the symptoms of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or TDS – a fictional condition that he has made up to undermine his critics. The video also includes several AI depictions of celebrities who have spoken out against the president and his administration all discussing how their lives have been affected by TDS. White House officials did not confirm whether the White House had reached out to any of the performers depicted, which include Whoopi Goldberg, Edward Norton and Julia Roberts, about using their likeness.
-
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has thrown her support behind Abdul El-Sayed, the doctor and progressive Democrat seeking the party’s nomination in Michigan’s closely watched Senate race. In an interview with the New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed El-Sayed, a former public health director, saying that “despite our ideological differences and whatever disagreements there are in the party, every single one of us sees this moment as existential.”
-
US employers added 57,000 jobs in June, dropping since last month’s figures, and considerably lower than economists predicted. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), employment continued to trend up in professional and business services, social assistance, and health care. Leisure and hospitality lost jobs. The June unemployment rate dropped to 4.2%, compared to 4.3% the month prior.
-
Donald Trump hijacked the United States’ 250th anniversary celebrations to serve “political ideology and pet projects”, a congressional report released today has revealed. The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF). It alleges that the president staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology.
-
Also today, a US appeals court has lifted an order requiring the Trump administration to reinstall dozens of exhibits it removed from national parks on the topics including slavery and climate change. A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals put on hold a judge’s order requiring the National Park Service to reinstall exhibits that it removed under a Trump directive targeting displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living”.
Right-wing commentators double-down on targeting pregnant visitors in wake of supreme court decision, media watchdog finds
Several right-wing commentators and pundits have demanded the Trump administration to target pregnant people traveling to the US, following the supreme court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship, according to a new report by media watchdog Media Matters.
Mike Davis, a former lawyer and host of the War Room podcast, called the ruling by the top court an “abomination” and said that “any woman illegal alien who is capable of having a child needs to be rounded up first”.
Similarly, the Federalist co-founder Sean Davis suggested denying visas to “all female foreigners” and even requiring “sterilization of all foreign visitors”. Meanwhile, former Fox News anchor Megan Kelly questioned on her podcast whether there would the “possibility of cracking down on pregnant aliens” coming to the US. “Revoking visas? Pregnancy tests, even? I mean, how far could we go with that?” she said.
Former Olympian indicted after reaching into reflecting pool – report
A three-time US Olympian and canoeist has been indicted by a grand jury in Washington DC after reaching into the reflecting pool, according to a report by CNN, citing a source familiar with the charges.
David Hearn was arrested last month on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property, after noticing a partly detached piece of the blue liner and reaching into the water to see what it felt like.
“I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn, who had been cycling, told the Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”
At the time of his arrest, Hearn had just finished a 52-mile bike ride when he visited the Lincoln Memorial to see the refurbished reflecting pool – whose botched $14m renovation has seen persistent blooming algae and peeling liner.
Richard Luscombe
in Miami
Immigration advocates in Florida have decried a “cruel and harmful” new rule by education officials aligned to hard-right Republican governor Ron DeSantis to ban undocumented students from state colleges and universities.
The Florida board of education voted on Tuesday to bar access to its 28 state-funded institutions to anybody not a US citizen or “lawfully present” in the country. It follows Florida’s move last year to strip discounted in-state tuition rates for certain immigrant students.
Opponents on Wednesday assailed the new directive, which some analysts estimate could cost Florida up to $15m annually in lost tuition and other fees. They also questioned if it was legal, given that it was approved by DeSantis’s hand-picked board of seven, instead of the elected state legislature.
“The rule-making process is supposed to implement existing legislation and laws that were passed, not create its own, and not create its own policies, which is exactly what the department is trying to do,” said Alexis Tsoukalas, senior analyst of the Florida Policy Institute, at a press conference hosted by the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
She said the action ran contrary to DeSantis’s own “Sail to 60” goal, a 2019 policy that sought to lift the number of Florida residents with “high-value” post-secondary education from below 50% to at least 60%.
“The Florida college system is already struggling with declining enrollment, this has been the case for the past several years, and it’s only gotten worse,” she said.
“It’s not like there are students waiting in the wings to enroll when others are denied admission. Florida cannot reach its attainment goal if a shrinking share are enrolling, so it is very much a concern for the state.”
Trump administration can avoid reinstalling exhibits on slavery and climate at parks, US court rules
On that topic, a US appeals court has lifted an order requiring the Trump administration to reinstall dozens of exhibits it removed from national parks on the topics including slavery and climate change.
A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals put on hold a judge’s order requiring the National Park Service to reinstall exhibits that it removed under a Trump directive targeting displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living”.
Last spring, Donald Trump issued an executive order to restore “truth and sanity to American history” by wiping away any suggestion that the United States was “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive” from national parks and federal lands.
The order required National Park Service staff to review every sign, brochure, film or book at a national park that “inappropriately disparages” Americans or is “unrelated to the beauty, abundance and grandeur of the American landscape”. Park rangers flagged thousands of materials to the government. Some of these were then removed or altered.
As part of the Guardian’s Deleted Data project, my colleagues Amy Qin and Flávio Pessoa have reviewed every submission and classified them by topic. The most common themes were Native American history, slavery, the climate crisis and the civil rights movement and Black history.
They write: “Critics say what’s happening in the national parks is more insidious than pandering to Donald Trump’s base or winning “culture wars” – it’s about the erasure of anyone who is not white, wealthy, Christian or male, and it’ll likely have a chilling effect on how history is told at the national parks for years to come.”
“It’s both stupid and uninformed and very pernicious,” said Anne Mitchell Whisnant, a history professor at Duke University who helped write visitor handbooks and conduct history research for several national parks in the US south-east prior to the Trump administration. “The Trump administration has a very particular idea of whose stories are important and whose stories made the America that they hope to restore.”
You can read the full report on Trump’s assault on US history here:
Trump posts AI video blasting celebrities for ‘Trump derangement syndrome’
The president has frequently used his social media, since he returned to the White House, to share AI-generated images and video. On Thursday, he posted his latest example – a deepfake clip that portrays him as a doctor talking about the symptoms of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or TDS – a fictional condition that he has made up to undermine his critics. The video also includes several AI depictions of celebrities who have spoken out against the president and his administration all discussing how their lives have been affected by TDS.
“I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, constantly angry,” said a deepfake version of Robert De Niro. “I made everyone miserable around me.”
In the video the AI-version of Trump, decked out in a white coat and stethoscope, said the “treatment” for TDS is to “turn off fake news, say your prayers, and if you ever feel anxious just have a Diet Coke like me, and you’re going to see a remarkable difference in your life.”
In response to the video, Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said that the president is “right” and that “Trump Derangement Syndrome is a crippling disease that has unfortunately rotted the brains of many people.” Officials did not confirm whether the White House had reached out to any of the performers depicted, which include Whoopi Goldberg, Edward Norton and Julia Roberts, about using their likeness.
My colleagues in Europe have been covering the latest strike in Kyiv, and note that a senior Ukrainian defence official, Rustem Umerov, and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner have held talks in the past two days, according to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Speaking at one of the sites targeted in a devastating Russian attack, as rescuers sifted through rubble, Zelenskyy said he still hoped Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff would visit Ukraine even though US-backed peace efforts to end the war have stalled for months. The Ukrainian president added that he hoped to have a meeting with Trump on the sidelines of a Nato summit in the Turkish capital Ankara next week.
Robert Tait
After a momentous term that ended with Tuesday’s rejection of Trump’s attempt to scrap birthright citizenship as a core tenet of American life, the supreme court has acquiesced in multiple power grabs from the White House’s most consequential occupant in generations to leave a dramatically transformed political landscape.
The birthright ruling, upholding the right to citizenship of anyone born in the US, appeared on the surface to constitute a major setback to Trump on one of his key signature issues.
The apparent rebuff recalled the court’s rejection in February of the president’s use of the emergency economic powers act to impose tariffs on a vast panoply of imports. The verdict provoked a fierce personal attack from Trump on the justices that ruled against him – yet still left him free to pursue tariffs by other mechanisms.
Closer inspection reveals a court that has shifted its perception of what is legally possible, while accommodating Trump’s extravagant and expansive view of his own presidential powers.
Nothing illustrates the sea change in legal perceptions as the lackluster manner of the court’s support for birthright citizenship, legal scholars say.
Read the full report here:
AOC endorses progressive Democrat in closely watched Michigan Senate race
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has thrown her support behind Abdul El-Sayed, the doctor and progressive Democrat seeking the party’s nomination in Michigan’s closely watched Senate race.
In an interview with the New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed El-Sayed, a former public health director, saying that “despite our ideological differences and whatever disagreements there are in the party, every single one of us sees this moment as existential.”
She told the Times: “I think many people are willing to put aside differences in order to give us the best chance at winning. And I think that Abdul gives us that right now.”
The race to replace outgoing senator Gary Peters has become one of the cycle’s most competitive Democratic primaries, shaping up as a test between insurgent and establishment-backed candidates – and a proxy for the party’s broader ideological rift.
El-Sayed, who already has the backing of independent senator Bernie Sanders, is hoping to capitalize on the momentum of other progressives who have notched congressional primary wins in recent months. He now leads his challengers in the latest polls, a field that includes congresswoman Haley Stevens – backed by senior Democratic leadership, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer – and state senator Mallory McMorrow, who has drawn support from prominent Democrats such as senator Elizabeth Warren.
As my colleague Tom Perkins reported last year, El-Sayed’s populist economic platform includes banning tax incentives for companies like Amazon, imposing new taxes on billionaires, eliminating medical debt and strengthening anti-monopoly laws to curb corporate price gouging.
Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement marks her first in a competitive Senate primary this midterm cycle. El-Sayed welcomed the support, writing on X: “AOC has spent her career taking on the powerful on behalf of everyday people, and she has shown all of us what courageous, smart, values-driven leadership looks like. I’m deeply honored to earn her endorsement. Onward to victory.”
Michigan is a critical hold for Democrats as they look to flip several Senate seats and regain control of the upper chamber. The Democratic nominee in the Great Lake State is likely to face former Republican representative Mike Rogers in the general election. Rogers previously ran for Senate in 2024 and lost to Elissa Slotkin by less than 0.5% of the vote, despite Donald Trump carrying the state.
