Last summer Megyn Kelly declared her yearslong feud with Donald Trump to now be water “under the bridge.” At a rally Saturday night, Trump seemed to beg to differ.
While campaigning in Rome, Georgia, Trump reminisced about the first GOP presidential debate back in 2015, riffing on how he wanted to be placed center-stage among the candidates and how the program opened with then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly asking him a pointed question about his treatment of women.
“Megyn Kelly. May she rest in peace,” Trump quipped to audible laughter, before taking a jab at her recent career pivot to right-wing media: “She’s sort of making a career by pretending she likes me.”
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The former president continued to recall how “She asked me that horrible question about women,” which led him to a tangent about how many women support his campaign, quickly leaving the Kelly roasting behind.
Trump and Kelly first began their long-running feud at that 2015 debate, when she asked him directly about his history of calling women he disliked “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” The confrontation provoked Trump into publicly maligning Kelly on multiple occasions, including when labeled her a “bimbo” and suggested she “had blood coming out of her eyes, or blood coming out of her wherever.”
Kelly later moved from Fox News to NBC, a short-lived stint that ended with her getting canned after defending blackface on her talk show. She later made a career comeback by firmly planting her roots in right-wing digital media. No longer a cable television—or any television, for that matter—star, she now hosts a decidedly conservative podcast that frequently targets liberals and celebrities for perceived “wokeism,” among other culture-war grievances.
Kelly’s rightward career pivot has also included a very public attempt at mending fences with Trump. Last summer, she recounted a positive encounter with the ex-president at a Turning Point USA conference. “There’s just something about him, it’s like an aura that sort of takes over the room,” she recalled. “There’s only one person you can look at. He could not have been nicer or more generous and had some interesting thoughts about the debates, whether he’s going to attend.”
Trump even appeared on her show in September for an hour-long exchange, in which Kelly even praised him for how he answered her 2015 debate question. The two sparred over issues plaguing Trump’s current campaign, however, such as his classified documents case. While Kelly has continued her defenses of Trump since the interview, he has not seemed to reciprocate Kelly’s overtures.
“I, she was, you know, boy, she became nastier all of a sudden,” Trump said at an Iowa rally in September. “She was pretty nasty, didn’t you think, anyone that watched it.”
