It was one more—and supposedly final—time into the breach for Rosie O'Donnell and Barbara Walters.
The View cohosts addressed their seemingly never-ending feud with Donald Trump on the air Wednesday morning before giving what they promise to be (our fingers are crossed) their last, albeit cutting, word on the topic.
"That poor, pathetic man," Walters said at the start of the show, prompting O'Donnell to issue a round of high-fives to her tablemates. "He just can't let go. But we're moving on."
Though not without one final remark.
"The man is obsessed with me, and I'm happy to say, his show tanked," O'Donnell said.
Of course, Trump wasn't content to let the ladies have the final word on the subject and shortly after the show issued a retaliatory statement of his own.
"Barbara Walters has taken the low road for the sake of her show rather than the sake of her morality," he said. "She lied with Star Jones and now she has chosen to lie again."
"Barbara has become a sad figurehead dominated by a third-rate comedian...Rosie just pushed her out like a ('pathetic') puppet."
The new exchange came just a day after Trump launched his latest insult offensive.
In a letter sent to O'Donnell Tuesday, and apparently cc'd to the whole of the media world, Trump did his best to fan the ongoing feud, this time pulling Walters into the fray.
Responding to New York tabloid reports that The View cohosts had a backstage bust-up over Walters' handling of the feud—namely her inability to squash the problem while O'Donnell was away on vacation—Trump condescendingly sided with O'Donnell, saying she has "good reason to be angry" with her boss.
Of Walters, he simply wrote, "she lied to both of us."
A spokesperson for The View, meanwhile, dismissed but did not deny the spat between cohosts, saying, "Whatever happened in the hair and makeup room was only a squabble. It's business as usual. Everyone has moved on."
As for Trump, he continued to detail two encounters he had with the broadcasting vet in the letter, one following O'Donnell's "maniacal and foolish rant" against him in late December—which sparked the feud—and another occurring several months prior to the brouhaha.
Trump claimed Walters phoned him after O'Donnell's initial verbal assault, in which O'Donnell criticized his handling of Miss USA Tara Conner's less than model lifestyle, "in order to apologize for your behavior...to be exact, [Walters] said that 'working with [O'Donnell] is like living in hell' and, more pointedly, 'Donald, never get into the mud with pigs' and, 'don't worry, she won't be here long.' "
He claimed in the letter that he encountered Walters two months ago at New York restaurant Le Cirque and, when he inquired over how O'Donnell was working out on the show, Walters purportedly responded with a roll of her eyes and asked, "Do you have to ruin my meal?"
The mud-slinging feud first kicked off last month, when O'Donnell called Trump a hypocrite for acting as "moral compass" to 20-year-old Conner. Trump fought back with a vengeance, making the basic cable and tabloid rounds, dubbing O'Donnell a "fat loser" and a "degenerate," among his more palatable accusations, at nearly every stop.
O'Donnell responded on her blog, posting both a poem in which she likened Trump to a "pimp" and a painting of the man she dubbed "The Comb-Over," and on The View, in which she claimed Trump was "obsessed" with her.
While Trump was always unlikely to allow The View crew to have the final word in their public battle, he does have to live with the fact that his own popularity is, as O'Donnell suggests, on the wane.
The latest installment of The Apprentice, which debuted Sunday on NBC, drew 9.1 million viewers, a series low for a premiere episode of the reality show.
The View, meanwhile, has only seen its numbers rise since O'Donnell took over as moderator in September. The femme-fueled morning show averaged 3.4 million viewers during November sweeps, a nearly 27 percent increase from the same time the previous year. Since the feud kicked off last month, the chatfest's ratings have skyrocketed, picking up roughly 77,000 viewers per week.