Trump demands Netflix remove Susan Rice from board

Netflix has become the latest US entertainment company to discover that “staying out of politics” is itself a political stance — and often an expensive one.

Former president Donald Trump is calling on Netflix to remove Susan Rice from its board, threatening unspecified retaliation if the company does not comply. The Hill reports that Trump’s demand follows Rice’s recent warning that corporations risk long-term damage by “bending a knee” to political pressure — a remark that, in today’s climate, reads less like a plea for neutrality and more like a pre-emptive strike in the next round of corporate purges.

Yahoo Entertainment similarly reports Trump’s message as an ultimatum: fire Rice or “pay the consequences.” Zero Hedge amplifies the conflict in the language of factional warfare, framing Rice as endorsing a future “revenge purge” if Democrats regain power.

The immediate story is a boardroom spat. Large streaming platforms now operate like quasi-public institutions: they curate speech at scale, negotiate across jurisdictions, and depend on regulatory goodwill for everything from tax treatment to labour rules to approvals that shape mergers, content distribution and data practices. That makes them attractive targets in a repeated game where politicians can extract compliance without passing new laws.

Netflix’s incentives are awkward. As a global platform, it wants predictable rules and minimal political risk. But political risk is no longer exogenous; it is being internalised into corporate governance. The board becomes not just a check on management but a signalling device to governments, activist investors, advertisers, and bureaucracies: who are “our people,” and who are we willing to sacrifice.

In game-theoretic terms, politicians benefit from making examples. If a high-profile company visibly ejects a politically controversial director, it demonstrates enforceability — encouraging other firms to pre-comply. If the company refuses, the politician’s incentive is to escalate, because backing down weakens future threats.

The uncomfortable implication is that “neutrality” is now a product that must be purchased — by bearing costs on one side or the other. A platform can try to buy peace by issuing statements, tweaking content policies, or rearranging leadership. But these moves rarely end the conflict; they simply teach the other side that pressure works.

Netflix is hardly unique. As regulators expand their reach — and as political movements treat private firms as instruments for cultural enforcement — corporate governance is turning into a proxy battlefield. Streaming, once sold as an escape from cable-era gatekeepers, is gradually inheriting cable’s old role: a distribution chokepoint that everyone insists must be “responsible,” meaning obedient to whichever coalition is loudest this week.