Many liberal celebrities vowed to leave the country if Donald Trump returned to the White House. Few put their money where their mouth is, but one notable exception is Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, Portia de Rossi.
In the wake of the intense drama about her talk show ending and her behind-the-scenes behavior, DeGeneres moved to a house in the Cotswolds (about a hundred miles west of London) in 2024. It was widely considered that DeGeneres’ move was spurred on by Trump’s re-election, but now she’s confirmed it.
Speaking in conversation in Cheltenham, she revealed that she and de Rossi decided they weren’t going back to the United States the moment the 2024 election results came in: “We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis, and I was like, ‘He got in.’ And we’re like, ‘We’re staying here.'”
This is a genuine hate crime. pic.twitter.com/Y4mqNN6OMs
— Bobby (@RealBlackIrish) July 19, 2025
And DeGeneres sounds like she’s now living a life straight out of a Richard Curtis movie. During the interview, she gushed about her “beautiful” countryside home and couldn’t get enough of England, saying, “It’s clean. Everything here is just better – the way animals are treated, people are polite. I just love it here.”
Another wedding
She also sounded a note of alarm over Trump-era erosion of LGBTQ+ rights and is fearful that gay marriage will be banned and her marriage annulled. She even said she and de Rossi are considering getting married once again in England: “They’re trying to literally stop [gay marriage] from happening in the future and possibly reverse it. Portia and I are already looking into it, and if they do that, we’re going to get married here.”
Let’s be clear here, DeGeneres’ vast wealth has enabled her to buy into what’s essentially a fantasy version of English life. She has an astonishing country home and a bucolic landscape to enjoy while much of the rest of England continues to suffer under a faltering economy, lingering austerity, and disintegrating public infrastructure.
But, even though things are not great for many in the U.K., the silver lining is that they can take a look across the Atlantic and breathe a sigh of relief that at least things aren’t as bad as they are over in the States. Yes, their politicians might be boring, but at least they’re not pants-on-head insane.
