President Trump called on Netflix to fire former National Security Advisor Susan Rice from its Board of Directors, responding to comments she made threatening corporations that have cooperated with or failed to oppose the Trump administration.
Trump posted on Truth Social Saturday after conservative activist Laura Loomer flagged Rice's recent remarks.
"Netflix should fire racist, Trump Deranged Susan Rice, IMMEDIATELY, or pay the consequences. She's got no talent or skills - Purely a political hack!"
In a follow-up post, Trump added:
"HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK. How much is she being paid, and for what???"
The question is worth asking. What exactly does a former Obama and Biden administration official bring to the board of a streaming entertainment company, other than political connections and the willingness to use them?
The comments that drew Trump's response deserve attention on their own terms. Just the News reports that in a recent interview, Rice issued what amounted to a warning to American businesses: cooperate with the current administration and a future Democratic government will come for you.
"Companies already are starting to hear they better preserve their documents. They better be ready for subpoenas. If they've done something wrong, they'll be held accountable, and if they haven't broken the law, good for them."
Read that again. A former senior government official, now sitting on the board of one of the largest media companies on Earth, is openly promising that corporations will face investigation for the sin of doing business with a duly elected president. She went further:
"This is not going to be an instance of, you know, forgive and forget. The damage that these people are doing is too severe to the American people and to our national interest."
This is not policy disagreement. This is preemptive political intimidation of the private sector. Rice is telling companies they need to pick a side, and that if they pick wrong, the machinery of government will be aimed at them the moment Democrats regain power.
Rice's trajectory from the Obama White House to Biden's domestic policy team to the Netflix boardroom illustrates a familiar pattern. Senior Democratic officials leave government, land on corporate boards, and then use those perches to advance political objectives that have nothing to do with shareholder value or content quality.
The arrangement benefits both parties. Netflix gets political cover and access. Rice gets a platform and a paycheck. The only people left out of the deal are the subscribers who signed up to watch movies, not to fund a former national security advisor's vendetta tour against American businesses.
And that's what makes her comments so revealing. She isn't speaking as a private citizen expressing concern. She's speaking as someone who held enormous power, expects to hold it again through allies, and wants corporate America to know it. The threat is the point.
Consider the irony. Democrats spent years warning about the politicization of institutions, about the dangers of using government power to punish political enemies, about the fragility of democratic norms. Rice's comments are a blueprint for exactly that. She is describing, in plain language, a future campaign of political retribution against companies whose only offense would be complying with the lawful directives of a sitting president.
If a Republican had said this, every editorial board in the country would call it authoritarian. When Rice says it, it barely makes the news cycle until Trump responds.
That asymmetry tells you everything about how the media assigns moral weight to identical behavior depending on who's doing it.
Netflix has not publicly responded to Trump's demand. The company will likely try to ride this out quietly, which is the default corporate posture when politics gets uncomfortable. But the days of quiet are getting shorter for companies that want to play both sides.
Rice's comments put Netflix in an awkward position. One of their board members is openly threatening other corporations for engaging with the federal government. That's not governance. That's activism with a fiduciary title attached.
Trump's response was characteristically blunt. But strip away the rhetoric and the underlying question is legitimate: What is Susan Rice doing on the board of an entertainment company, and whose interests is she serving when she uses that position to issue political threats?
Netflix shareholders might want an answer.
