Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador under the Obama administration, national security adviser, and also served in various capacities with former President Joe Biden, gave an interview on a podcast with Preet Bharara. He is that very liberal federal prosecutor that developed quite a name for himself in New York, going after, I think, targeted a lot of people based on their politics.
But nonetheless, it was one of the strangest interviews because she flat out, candidly, with no reservations, sent a message to people who were conservative, Republican, or Trump supporters, and she used “Game of Thrones” imagery. “You’ve taken the need of [President] Donald Trump. You have allowed him to bully you.”
She was talking about the so-called elites in the academic world, in the corporate world, in the institutional world. “And we’re not going to forget,” she says, “that you did that. And you better have your documents ready because when we come back into power, we’re going to … ” And the implication was: take you to court, make you pay, shake you.
I don’t know what she was talking about, but it was a direct threat.
But here’s what’s strange about it: Start with Susan Rice herself. If you look back through her latter years with the Obama administration, it was nothing but a complete disaster. She was the one that, you remember, that the CIA and the Obama administration wheeled out on a Sunday afternoon to explain the Benghazi attack that killed the four Americans at the annex and the consulate.
Five times she told the American people that those attacks were spontaneous, and they were because of some right-wing Coptic video maker who caused it all. That was not true. That was a preplanned, either an al-Qaeda or ISIS or some type of radical Islamic preplanned assault. People knew what they were doing. They were well armed. They were well organized.
Why did she go out five times and mislead the American people? Because the Obama administration had been warned prior that their security was too lax and they did not want to give the impression that that attack was preventable, which it was.
She was the one that also assured us, Americans, that when former President Barack Obama issued those red lines and said if Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian forces move WMD around or still have it, that’s going to be intolerable, i.e., I’m going to take it out. When they didn’t do that and they backed out, and we knew they had it, she lied to the American people and said, essentially, that they no longer had WMD.
Remember also she wrote, just wrapping up her career, she wrote a little memo to herself in the last weeks of the Obama administration about Michael Flynn. She went to a meeting, and it was pretty clear in that meeting they had planned to subvert the incoming administration with the false narrative of Russian collusion and that somehow Mike Flynn, the national security adviser-designate, had been colluding with the Russians, but that was not true.
But then she wrote a fake memo to herself suggesting that they hadn’t really done that, that it was all up and up. And then, of course, she and others had requested the unmasking of people related with Trump in otherwise confidential files. So, she doesn’t have a good record.
That’s why she didn’t have a high-profile position in the Biden administration.
But there is also some real problems with what she said. She never said to corporate America, to the academic world, to the institutional world, to the political world what they had done wrong. She just said, “We’re going to come back. People don’t like Trump. It’s our turn to come back. We’re not going to play by the old rules. No, no, no. We’re going to be tough. You better get your … ”
Well, what had they done? What had they done? If she’s implying they let people off, or they laid people off that were associated with DEI, that was in accordance with the Supreme Court ruling barring race-based preferences in academic life.
If she means that Donald Trump does not have the authority to issue an executive order stopping DEI, the whole idea of executive orders goes back to the beginning, almost to the republic.
But more importantly, Barack Obama was the one who said, “I have a pen and I have a phone and I’m going to use it.” And that’s when he lost control of Congress and he issued, up until that time, almost the greatest number of executive orders.
So, if she’s not going to tell us that anybody committed a felony or misdemeanor, and yet she’s going to punish them, that doesn’t sound too legitimate.
How does she know, secondly, that she’s going to come back into power? The polls are very volatile. Donald Trump has made, as we’ve talked before, a vast investment in the economy. Inflation is down, unemployment is down, gross domestic product is solid. Foreign investment is at record levels. So is energy production.
And when the “Big, Beautiful Bill” is fully enacted and filters its way through the economy, you’re going to see enormous stimuli given reductions in the tax code, reductions in the deductions that you have to make for the IRS, no tax on tips, etc.
It’s going to have an enormous effect, and it’s going to come into effect before the midterms.
We don’t know what the world is going to look like abroad in Ukraine, in Cuba, in Iran. It may be that Donald Trump is able to solve two or three or all of them. November’s a long way away, so I wouldn’t be so sure, Susan Rice, that you will win the November elections, much less, if you are alluding, as I think you were, to 2028.
If you heard Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference and you’ve seen JD Vance in the 2024 election take down almost every hostile reporter that interviewed him, they’re going to be a very formidable team. And I don’t see anything quite like that with Gavin Newsom.
I don’t see it with AOC, especially after her performance at the Munich Security Conference. I don’t think Pete Buttigieg is a viable candidate. So, we’ve seen Kamala Harris, very uninspiring.
Maybe Josh Shapiro. But given the antisemitic nature of the new Democratic Socialist Party, I doubt, as we saw with the vice-presidential selection in 2024, I doubt that he would have a chance to be the nominee of the new Democratic Party.
And finally, when you talk about retribution, where have you been, Susan Rice? Who were the people who tried to take Donald Trump off 25, 26 state ballots … unprecedented? Who were the people who for the first time in history impeached a president twice? Who were the people who tried him as a private citizen when he was out of office in the Senate? Tried to convict him.
Who were the people behind the Letitia James frivolous lawsuit that tried to bankrupt him with almost a $500 million fine because he took a loan out with a Deutsche Bank and they claimed that he overvalued the assets, which the Deutsche Bank said he didn’t? That he paid the interest on time to the profit of the bank who had no complaint?
Who was Alvin Bragg trying to shoehorn a federal offense onto a state law and said that Donald Trump’s non-disclosure with Stormy Daniels was a federal campaign violation? Who were the people behind the crazy E. Jean Carroll persecution lawsuit that may have cost Donald Trump $90 million?
Who were the people behind Jack Smith, who was knee deep along with the FBI and knew about that with Merrick Garland, the raiding, the Mar-a-Lago … the home of Donald Trump?
And the idea that Donald Trump violated some confidential agreement with the government when an archival dispute when Joe Biden had taken materials that were confidential and classified from his days in the Senate in three or four, much less secure, places?
Who’s behind all that? Who’s behind Fani Willis when a person calls the registrar and says, “I know there’s votes there, find them,” as a lot of candidates do to every registrar when they feel that they’re not adequately looking for votes that have been cast. There was a lot of things to be suspicious about in Georgia and turned that into a felony.
All of those prosecutors were politically minded, biased, and ultimately found themselves in their own ethical dilemmas. But who did that? My point is, Susan Rice, your party has already taken out retribution. You were the ones that politicized the Department of Justice. You were the ones, going back to 2015 and ’16 with Russian collusion, 2020 with laptop disinformation.
Your entire career of the Democratic Party—your career, Hillary Clinton’s career, Barack Obama—has been to destroy Donald Trump. So, we don’t need lectures on retribution. You’ve already tried to practice retribution against Trump. And I don’t think you’re going to be in a position of power necessarily in the Congress in 2026, and I have a pretty good idea you won’t come back to power in 2028.
But otherwise, you really displayed your true nature and put your cards on the table. And I don’t think that your opponents are going be naive once they understand what your true intentions are, which are completely vengeful and incoherent.
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