Oprah Winfrey Reacts to Donald Trump Calling Her "Biased" and "Insecure"

"I don't like giving negativity power," she tells Ellen DeGeneres

By Zach Johnson Feb 22, 2018 12:45 PMTags
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Oprah Winfrey has no time for nonsense.

And that's precisely how she would describe President Donald Trump's recent tweet, in which he criticized her interviewing abilities in a 60 Minutes segment, called her "very insecure" and dared her to run for office, just "so she can be exposed and defeated just like all of the others!"

Winfrey did not respond to Trump's via Twitter Sunday, but she was asked about it on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Thursday. "I woke up and I just thought…" Winfrey said, raising her hands. "And I don't like giving negativity power, so I just thought, 'What?' What I actually really did was I went back and looked at the tape to see if there was any place that that could be true. Did I feel like it was slanted or biased? I went back and looked at every tape; I called the producers."

As Winfrey explained to Ellen DeGeneres, whenever she films segments for the CBS program, "You sit in a room with at least seven other people who critique the piece before you air it—before you do the introduction to it—and then they give you the critique. They critique every word. 'Is this fair?' You have this whole panel of people looking at whether it was fair. And actually, the first time I saw it, I said, 'There's something missing here from the conversation.'"

Winfrey moderated a discussion with a diverse group of voters from Grand Rapids, MI, asking questions based on recent headlines. "When I had asked the question, 'Do you care about what other people think about America?' they only used the Democratic side. I remembered the guy Matt had said, 'No. We're the only people who are worried what other countries are thinking of us.' And I said, 'I think you should go back and put that in because it makes it more balanced.' So, I was working very hard to do the opposite of what I was hate-tweeted about, [but] it's OK."

DeGeneres defended Winfrey earlier in the show, saying, Trump has "gone too far."

 

"Oprah is my friend," she warned Trump, "and when you mess with Oprah, you mess with me."

"President Trump, it's time for an aha moment. You're not just some guy on Twitter anymore. You're the President for all of us. It is your job to unite people, and you don't do it by attacking people, especially Oprah," she added. "Like I said, you don't mess with Oprah. She's my friend."

Despite Trump's challenge to run for president in 2020, Winfrey isn't interested in the job. "I've always felt very secure and confident with myself in knowing what I could do and what I could not. And so it's not something that interests me," she told InStyle. "I don't have the DNA for it."