Trump Tries to Get a Democratic Official Fired From the Netflix Board for Being a Democrat

Donald Trump is not in favor of capitalism or a free market. He’s in favor of a personalist system in which all economic decisions have to be passed by him. That has been on display in the Netflix-Warner Brothers merger negotiations, where he has repeatedly intervened on behalf of a rival company owned by his supporters, and he is now dictating who Netflix can hire.

The Guardian reports:

Donald Trump has told Netflix to remove the Democratic foreign policy expert Susan Rice from its board or “face the consequences,” while the streaming platform is locked in an extraordinary corporate battle to take control of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD). …

Trump’s comments herald a fresh intervention in the takeover battle between Netflix and Paramount Skydance for the studios and streaming businesses of WBD only weeks after promising not to get involved.

Rice was a member of Netflix’s board from 2018 to 2020, before leaving during the Biden administration. She rejoined in 2023 and sits on the company’s nominating and governance committee.

She appeared on a podcast in recent days, during which she said that corporations, law firms and news organizations that showed loyalty to Trump would be held accountable if the Democrats returned to power.

This is not the first time Trump has attempted to tell private companies who they can employ. It’s an attempt to starve out his political opposition, ensuring they cannot prosper or rise to positions of prominence and influence—so that there will be no independent voices to contradict him.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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