President Donald Trump on late Saturday urged Netflix to fire board member Susan Rice or “pay the consequences,” after her remarks that Democrats would seek corporate responsibility once returned to power in November during the midterm elections.
Trump, in a Truth Social post on Saturday, stated Rice, who worked as former President Joe Biden’s domestic policy chief and held top foreign policy posts under former President Barack Obama, as “purely a political hack” with “no talent or skills.”
“HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK,” Trump wrote.
In a podcast last week, Rice said, “it is not going to end well” for corporations, news organizations, and law firms that “bent the knee” to Trump, and that their deference is unpopular.
Rice told Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, added, “There is likely to be a swing in the other direction, and they are going to be caught with more than their pants down. They’re going to be held accountable by those who come in opposition to Trump and win at the ballot box.”
She said, “If these corporations think that Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules, and say, ‘Never mind, we will forgive you for all the people you fired and all the policies and principles you violated, all the laws you skirted,’ I think they got another thing coming.”
Rice was a member of the Netflix board of directors from 2018 to 2021 and returned in 2023 after leaving the Biden administration. A spokesperson at Netflix refused to comment on Trump’s remarks, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment immediately.
Trump added a screenshot of an earlier post from far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer, who said Rice’s remarks were “anti-American” and urged the president to “kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger now.” Loomer also included Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr on her post.
The comments come after Trump reported to NBC News earlier this month that the Department of Justice would take care of the deal and that he would not be part of their audit, after claiming that he would take part in the process. The DOJ is also evaluating the proposal by Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
However, Netflix has also offered to purchase WBD in a $72 billion agreement that would exclude the cable channels of the company, such as CNN. Paramount Skydance, in response, unveiled a hostile takeover offer for all of WBD, promising its shareholders $30 per share in an all-cash deal.
The DOJ is looking into the possibility that the proposed deal by Netflix would be detrimental to competition, and it also questions how the past acquisitions by the company have influenced competition for creative talent, as earlier reported by the Wall Street Journal this month.
Bloomberg reported, citing documents, that the agency is also investigating, in its review, whether the streaming giant employs anticompetitive strategies in negotiations with independent content creators to acquire programming.
Steve Sunshine, Netflix’s outside counsel and the head of the global antitrust group at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, told CNBC in a statement that the law firm has not received any warning that the DOJ is probing monopolization.
In a statement, the Chief Legal Officer of Netflix, David Hyman, claimed that the company is in an “extremely competitive market.”
Hyman indicated, “Any claim that it is a monopolist, or seeking to monopolize, is unfounded. We neither hold monopoly power nor engage in exclusionary conduct, and we’ll gladly cooperate, as we always do, with regulators on any concerns they may have.”
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said last month that he believes the company will have no issues obtaining regulatory approval, “because this deal is pro-consumer … pro-innovation, pro-worker.”
