Jane Fonda said she lies in bed and imagines what she’d say to President Donald Trump if she ever got the chance.
In a conversation with Kara Swisher on her podcast, “On with Kara Swisher,” Fonda revealed she sometimes spends nights visualizing how she would get through to Trump if the two of them ever had a conversation. She thinks she has some experience getting through to people like the president after having lived with Ted Turner for a decade.
“In my mind, sometimes when I lie in bed, I have conversations with him and I feel like I understand something about him because I lived with Ted Turner for 10 years,” Fonda said on Thursday’s podcast episode. “You have things in common. I would try to touch his heart.”
She added: “It’s important to understand what he does and what he says. The behavior is the language of the traumatized, and you have to see through it. You can hate the behavior, but you have to see through it to the traumatized person and not hate them, because if you hate them, then it brings you down. I don’t hate him. Joy Behar got really mad at me on ‘The View’ when I said that. But I feel better. I view all these guys and Musk and the others – they’re just not well. It’s the not-wellness that we see acted out.”
This is not the first time Fonda has employed a compassion-first approach in how to deal with the current president. When she was honored with the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2025 she again pitched empathy as the greatest weapon against the current administration.
“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak, or woke,” she said from the stage. “And by the way, woke just means that you give a damn about other people.”
You can watch Fonda’s full interview in the video above.
