EDGY COMEDIENNE DROPS F-BOMBS ON LATE NIGHT TV: Rosie O’Donnell Claims Trump Brought Back Fascism.
Rosie O’Donnell kicked off her second night of guest hosting ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Tuesday, much like she did on Monday, with Kimmel-esque nicknames for President Trump coupled with accusations of fascism while not appreciating the irony of being able to host a show in such an allegedly fascist environment.
O’Donnell also made sure to follow in Anthony Anderson’s footsteps and mock Trump’s escape from Turkey by shrinking the size of the airport catering truck to a simple cart, “This has been kind of a strange experience for me, because all of a sudden I’m re-famous. I’m back in the spotlight all thanks to President Oompa J. Loompa, who is watching us this evening from inside a catering cart. You know, I couldn’t have done it without you, sweetie. You brought me back, just like you did with fascism and the measles. But enough about him.”
And yet curiously, when Trump was reelected president, she moved from America to Ireland without incident, and could fly back from Ireland to Los Angeles to guest-host for Kimmel, and presumably will soon return there without incident. Worst. Hitler. Ever.
Couldn’t Rosie’s writers come up with material that isn’t 60 years old? As Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America” about speaking at Princeton in the mid-1960s:
The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called “The New Life Out There” for New York magazine*. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, [Paul] Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy’s body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester’s book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights. Suddenly I heard myself blurting out over my microphone: “My God, what are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a … Happiness Explosion!”
That merely sounded idiotic. The kid up in the balcony did the crying baby. The kid down below did the raccoon … Krakatoa, East of Java … I disappeared in a tidal wave of rude sounds … Back to the goon squads, search-and-seize and roust-a-daddy …
Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was [Gunter] Grass, speaking in English.
“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn’t you say!
As for Rosie, six decades later:
* This was the original iteration of New York magazine, and a very different beast from its current form: New York Magazine Turns Its Back on the City’s Jews.