This image was lost some time after publication.

We'd hoped that by last night's premiere of The Apprentice: LA we'd have already seen an end to the ugly feud between notoriously media-shy and soft-spoken nemeses Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell, allowing us to fully devote our rapt attentions upon the West Coast adventures of the Manhattan land baron and his Slovenian trophy succubus. Sadly, however, the fat jokes and combover cracks continue to be lobbed from either side (best single development: In Touch Weekly's probably fictitious report of Trump frenemy Martha Stewart sending O'Donnell a bouquet of roses with a note attached reading, "Be careful of pricks"), with nary an olive branch offering in sight. On The View today, O'Donnell had this to say about Trump's merciless jabs at her weight (video available courtesy of BestWeekEver.tv):

"It's the way I look. He can't resist. I love when people say you're fat like you don't know," O'Donnell joked Monday on ABC's "The View." "... It's always the first comment of someone who disagrees with you if you happen to be on the plus side." [...]

"The guy, he's obsessed with me, obviously," she said. [...]

O'Donnell said she went shopping recently and "all of these plus-size women" with "tears in their eyes" approached her with words of support.

"He wounded millions of women by saying that I was fat, you know?"

O'Donnell also described how Trump calling her a "fat pig" has upset her young children, who have expressed concern that a man with a "dump truck" (not a Heathers-inspired fat lesbian insult, but a 7-year-old's misinterpretation of the name Donald Trump) was going "take all [Rosie's] money away." Donald, meanwhile, has already managed to issue his swat back, downplaying the "fat pig" comment as a mere sliver of the larger Rosie-insult pie, and taking a shot at O'Donnell-defender Barbara Walters while he was at it. From an Extra press release:

"Rosie, as usual, is misquoting me. I used the word "slob", I used the word "degenerate" and I used the words "not very smart." The word "fat" played a very small role, if any, in my description of her."

In reaction to Barbara Walters saying that Trump is lying about remarks she made during a phone conversation they had last week, Trump responds, "Barbara lied, as she knows very well. She will have to live with herself. She admits to phoning me. Isn't it obvious to everybody that if she phoned me, she had to be saying what I've stated, not what she claims to have said. This reminds me very much of the Star Jones fiasco and Barbara's supposed statements about her."

Actually, that's not so obvious to us. What is obvious, however, is that no one has ever attacked Queen Ant Barbara Walters without quickly finding her razor-sharp mandibles buried deep inside them and sucking out their nourishing life fluids moments before tossing the empty husks aside. With the ratings for last night's Apprentice premiere down significantly from even last season's all-time series low (could Mark Burnett have somehow miscalculated the public's appetite for watching hot chicks in hiked skirt suits getting wet n' sudsy at a WeHo car wash?), and Trump finding himself named a co-defendant in a 49-year-old rejected Apprentice applicant's motion calling for all other potential victims of the series' alleged ageist casting practices to join him in a class-action lawsuit, it would appear as if O'Donnell has won this round. Or, as she might put it, "Ching chong. Donald Trump. Ching chong ching chong chong, bite me. Ching chong."