President Joe Biden’s domestic policy chief is promising revenge against the voters, business executives, and appointees who support President Donald Trump’s 2024 election mandate.
“A very prominent public figure, who has served at nearly the very highest levels, once told me … ‘Revenge is best served cold,’ and the older I get, the more I see the wisdom of that,” Susan Rice said in a February 19 video interview by a fellow Democrat.
She added:
When it comes to the elites, you know, the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media … it’s not going to end well for them, for those that decided that they would act in their perceived very narrow self-interest, which I would underscore, is very short-term self-interest, and, you know, take a knee to Trump.
The comments reflect the Democrats’ deep personal resentment and anger at voters’ rejection of their elite agendas, and of the voters’ support for Trump’s populist agenda in 2016 and 2o24.
That resentment makes it difficult for Democrats to make concessions to the voters, although many have just adopted moderate-sounding rhetoric.
Rice was a foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama until he was replaced by Trump. She was the top domestic policy adviser to Joe Biden from January 2021 to May 2023, and saw her policy accomplishments trumped in November 2024.
In her podcast show with former Democratic prosecutor Preet Bharara, an Indian immigrant, Rice showed her deep anger and resentment toward the groups that have not submitted to her gang:
They’re now starting to realize, wait a minute, no, this is not popular. Trump is not popular. What he is doing, whether on the economy and affordability or on immigration now, is not popular, and 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.
And I can tell you, Preet, as I talk to leaders in Washington, leaders in our party, leaders in the states, if these corporations think that the Democrats when they come back in power are going to, you know, play by the old rules and [say] ‘”Never mind, we’ll forgive you for all the people you fired, all the policies and principles you violated, all the laws you’ve skirted,”
I think they’ve got another thing coming … they’re going to be surprised. Democrats have had a bellyful, and we’re not going to play by, you know, the old set of rules.
“We’re not going to be suckers … there will be an accountability agenda,” Rice said.
Rice did not care to explain how her “accountability agenda” might widen the civic divide caused by the Democrats’ angry and violent rejection of Trump’s two election victories.
Rice masked her hate behind tepid and cosmetic promises to curb border chaos and manage migrant crime:
We need to have strong borders. I come from a national security background. I understand the importance of sovereignty and territorial integrity and national defense. We need to have strong borders, and we need to ensure that we, like other countries, have control of our borders … [And] we must deal with the the challenge of those who are here, who are undocumented [and] have committed crimes of violence — we need to be able to remove them in a targeted, lawful, rational way that doesn’t spread terror and lawlessness throughout our communities.
Those comments reflect her lessons from Trump’s 2024 win, which was greatly helped by her failure to discipline Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Ali Mayorkas.
But Rice refused to make any actual concessions on Biden’s migration policy, which helped wreck Americans’ economy with low wages, higher rents, and rapid inflation.
Instead, she pushed for a revival of Mayorkas’s migration policies, which favored foreigners and Wall Street investors over ordinary Americans.
She argued that Americans do not have the right to curb migration because the United States actually belongs to foreigners and their children:
We have to be clear eyed in the following ways: We are a nation of immigrants, and unless you are of Native American descent or African American descent — like me, and actually I’m both, but came and came here against your will, or came here, or, you know, many, many eons before the first European settlers — you came as an immigrant. I also have an immigrant background — my mother’s parents were immigrants from Jamaica who came to the United States in 1912.
So we are a nation of immigrants, and that is one of the great things that has defined us and been a source of our strength, and we need to preserve and strengthen legal pathways for people to come to the United States, to study, to work and when they’ve earned it, to become citizens … Lawful pathways that are open and that are well greased for those that choose to come here.
Those statements echo the revolutionary, corporatist, and quasi-colonialist policies of both Obama and Mayorkas.
In a future White House run by Democrats, many millions of illegal migrants in the United States must be amnestied and put in voting booths, Rice insisted:
We have a reality. There are many people who have who came to this country as undocumented, people who have lived here, worked here, paid taxes, been lawful, you know, responsible residents who have contributed to our society. And those people still live in the shadows, and we do need a way to enable them to go through a process, a rigorous process that allows them to have regularized and normalized status. And that’s what was the objective with these [Obama 2013] attempts at comprehensive immigration reform.
Rice admitted that Trump has successfully blocked illegal migration at the border, but showed particular anger at Trump’s so-far successful efforts to curb legalized migration via the airports:
Trump has turned everything on its head. He’s jettisoned almost all legal pathways to come to this country — at great detriment to our farmers, to our construction industry, to our competition in high tech, to our medical infrastructure.
I mean, all of the ways that he is setting us back through denying lawful pathways … is beyond dangerous — it’s wholly destructive, not only to the fabric of our country, but I think it’s going to be the undoing of his party.
Unfortunately for Rice and her privileged progressive alliances, Trump’s policies are making life better for the ordinary Americans who live in someone else’s “Nation of Immigrants.”
Under Trump’s low-migration, high-deportation reforms, Americans’ wages are up, housing costs are down, inflation is declining, transport costs are shrinking, crime is dropping, and corporations are spending heavily to help Americans become more productive and earn more wages for each working hour. His economic reforms, however, are opposed by establishment Republicans and their progressive partners.
The pro-citizen, pro-wage policy is deeply opposed by Democrats, who instead promise to raise living standards for migrants and citizens via government benefits.
The Democrats’ pushback against Trump’s deportations is an indirect attack on Trump’s emerging low-migration/high-productivity national economic strategy and his 2026 policy on affordability.