Rosie O'Donnell — currently scheduled to fill in for Jimmy Kimmel on ABC this summer — appeared on CNN's Jim Acosta Show this weekend and made two specific claims: that Donald Trump stole the 2024 election from Kamala Harris, and that Trump will manufacture a crisis to cancel the 2026 midterms entirely.
"I don't think it happened. I think Kamala won. I do," O'Donnell told Acosta, as reported by NewsBusters. She offered no evidence, cited no data, and made no call for a recount or formal investigation.
She then went further. "I think he's going to come up with some big tragedy... maybe another assassination attempt," O'Donnell said. "He's going to declare that the elections are off. That's what I think is going to happen because that's in the fascist playbook."
Acosta's responses at various points in the exchange: "Interesting." And: "It's so true."
O'Donnell also addressed why she left the United States. "I mean, part of the reason that I left is I never in a million years thought we would put a convicted felon, who tried to start an insurrection, back in office," she said. Trump won the 2024 election with approximately 77 million votes. No credible legal challenge to that result has been filed or sustained.
For two years after the 2020 election, claims that results had been manipulated were systematically flagged and removed from major platforms. Guests on cable news who questioned Democratic victories faced immediate on-air corrections and "without evidence" chyrons. The same networks covered January 6th as evidence that election denialism was a direct threat to democratic institutions.
O'Donnell's segment on CNN had none of that. No fact-check banner. No disclaimer. No pushback beyond "Interesting."
O'Donnell is not facing deplatforming or professional consequences. She is scheduled to host on ABC this summer and received a national cable television platform to assert — without evidence — that the 2024 election was stolen and that the president plans to stage an assassination attempt to cancel the next one.
Jim Acosta told her: "It's so true."
