Rosie O’Donnell Told Jim Acosta the 2024 Election Was Stolen and Trump Will Cancel the Midterms. She Offered No Evidence for Any of It.

In a June 17, 2026 interview with former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, who now hosts an independent show and Substack after leaving the network, comedian and actress Rosie O’Donnell told the host she does not believe President Donald Trump (R) actually won the 2024 presidential election. “I think Kamala won. I do,” she said — offering, by every account of the conversation, no evidence to support it.

O’Donnell, a longtime Trump antagonist who left the United States for Ireland after the 2024 result, went further in adjacent interviews that week, predicting Trump would manufacture a “catastrophic event” — “an assassination attempt or a terrorist bombing” — to suspend coming elections. NewsBusters, which first flagged the segment, headlined it bluntly: O’Donnell told Acosta the election was stolen and the midterms would be canceled.

This is a TDS Watch item, and we report it as exactly that: a celebrity asserting, as fact, an evidence-free election-theft claim and an end-of-democracy prediction on a friendly platform. The facts here are that she said it and that the claims do not survive contact with the public record — the 2024 results are certified, and the 2026 midterms are proceeding on schedule. We do not assert her claims are true; we document them and check them against reality.

• "I think Kamala won" — O'Donnell's verbatim claim to Acosta that Trump did not really win 2024 — stated without evidence · Source: Fox News; NewsBusters
• Zero — pieces of evidence she offered; she cited only 'researchers' and something she 'read online again today' · Source: Fox News; Yahoo
• "No elections" — her prediction that Trump will stage a crisis — an 'assassination attempt or terrorist bombing' — to cancel upcoming votes · Source: Breitbart; Mediaite
• Certified — the status of the 2024 result: Trump won the popular vote, the Electoral College, and all major battlegrounds · Source: FEC; Fox News
• Ireland — where O'Donnell relocated after the 2024 election — she is critiquing American democracy from abroad · Source: Fox News; NewsBusters

The line that drove the coverage was short and unequivocal. “I don’t think it happened. I think Kamala won. I do,” O’Donnell told Jim Acosta. Pressed only lightly, she did not produce a recount, a court ruling, an audit, or a single named source — she gestured at unspecified “researchers” and said she had “read it online again today.” That is the entire evidentiary basis on offer for the assertion that the certified winner of a national election did not actually win it.

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“I don't think it happened. I think Kamala won. I do.”

Rosie O'Donnell — to Jim Acosta, June 17, 2026

Here the claim collapses. President Donald Trump (R) won the 2024 election decisively: he carried the national popular vote, secured a clear Electoral College majority over former Vice President Kamala Harris (D), and swept the major battleground states en route to becoming the second president in U.S. history to win non-consecutive terms. The results were certified by the states and by Congress. There has been no successful legal challenge, no recount that reversed an outcome, and no official finding of fraud sufficient to alter the result — because none exists.

The irony is not subtle. For four years, the same media circles that now nod along to O’Donnell built their brand condemning election denial as a uniquely dangerous assault on democracy. A celebrity insisting on camera that the losing candidate “really won,” sourced to online reading, is election denial — the precise thing the genre exists to oppose.

The second half of O’Donnell’s commentary that week moved from the past to the future. She predicted Trump would not merely rig a coming vote but engineer a crisis to call it off altogether: “some sort of crisis, whether it’s an assassination attempt or a terrorist bombing — there will be some catastrophic event and he will say there will be no elections.” She framed it, she said, as “the fascist playbook.” The prediction is, by definition, unfalsifiable in the moment — and it runs directly against the visible reality that the 2026 midterm cycle is already underway, with candidates filing, primaries on the calendar, and election machinery operating normally across all fifty states.

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What makes this a TDS Watch item is not only the claim but the setting. By the accounts of the interview, Acosta offered only mild resistance — allowing that it is “hard to believe” Trump won, while saying he generally trusts American democracy because he is “old-fashioned.” That is not a fact-check; it is a soft landing. A claim that a national election was stolen, advanced with zero evidence, sailed through the conversation essentially unchallenged. This is the second time in under a year that O’Donnell has used Acosta’s platform for this kind of material; in September 2025 she floated Trump-assassination-truther theories on his show to a similarly gentle reception.

None of this requires guessing at O’Donnell’s sincerity. She plainly believes what she said. The accountability point is narrower and harder to dodge: an evidence-free election-theft claim and an end-of-democracy prophecy were presented as analysis, by a public figure, on a platform that markets itself as a defender of democratic norms — and almost no one in the room pushed back.

O’Donnell’s feud with Trump is decades old, and her recent commentary has escalated in kind rather than degree. The through-line across the 2025 and 2026 appearances is the same: sweeping, dramatic claims — stolen elections, staged assassination attempts, canceled votes — delivered with total confidence and zero documentation, to interviewers who treat the confidence as a substitute for the documentation. That is the mechanism this site exists to flag, whoever is doing it: an assertion dressed as a finding, with nothing underneath.

Strip away the celebrity and the friendly host and what is left is plain: Rosie O’Donnell asserted, with no evidence, that the certified 2024 election was stolen and that the 2026 midterms will be canceled by a manufactured crisis. The first claim is contradicted by the certified record; the second is contradicted by a midterm cycle that is visibly proceeding right now. We do not soften those facts to be polite to either side. O’Donnell is entitled to her contempt for Trump; she is not entitled to her own election results. When a public figure presents an evidence-free election-theft claim as truth on a platform that bills itself as pro-democracy, the responsible move is to say so — calmly, with the record in hand.

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Last updated June 21, 2026