@Amuse | Commentary, via Substack
I will admit, when I first read that Susan Rice was still ensconced on the Defense Policy Board well into the new Trump administration, I thought it must surely be fake news, some hallucination conjured by an overactive internet rumor mill. Yet, with the bitter taste of disbelief still fresh, the facts became clear.
Not only had she lingered, she had lingered officially, and with all the institutional imprimatur the position carries. It is the sort of stunning oversight that shakes one’s faith in the assumption that elections carry consequences.
Rice, a veteran of Obama-era foreign policy failures and perhaps best remembered for her calculatedly deceptive Sunday show performances following the Benghazi disaster, was somehow still whispering counsel into the halls of the Pentagon in 2025.
Her known hostility to President Trump, his America First doctrine, and the foundational pillars of his administration did not, apparently, disqualify her. Her presence was not merely inappropriate, it was absurd, a lingering ghost from an administration the voters had quite emphatically rejected.
Thankfully, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth acted swiftly. Upon confirming the disgraceful truth, he took the only responsible course available: he discharged the entire cadre of Pentagon advisory board members, wiping the slate clean.
Yet the discovery of Rice’s lingering influence opened a larger question in my mind.
How many other advisory boards, spread across the vast administrative sprawl of Washington, remained populated by individuals not just ideologically distant from the president but openly hostile to his agenda?
When I dug deeper, the findings were no less alarming.
At the State Department, Thomas Donilon, a consummate Democratic insider who served as Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, continued to co-chair the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Donilon, whose worldview is saturated in the globalist dogmas that Trumpism explicitly rejects, was not some neutral technocrat offering dispassionate advice.
He was, and remains, a committed architect of the very foreign policy status quo that voters repudiated.
Serving alongside Donilon was Cecilia Muñoz, another alumnus of the Obama White House, celebrated in progressive circles for her aggressive domestic policy advocacy. That she too advised the State Department in 2025 suggests not malevolent intent by Trump officials, but the lingering inertia of an entrenched bureaucracy and the sheer pace at which the new administration had to operate.
The situation at the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board was equally disquieting.
Janet Napolitano, former Obama DHS Secretary and Democratic governor, lent her counsel, as did Evan Bayh, a loyal son of the Democratic establishment. Jane Harman, the California Democrat whose tenure on the House Intelligence Committee made her a fixture of Beltway orthodoxy, also held a seat, alongside Calvin Smyre, the “Dean” of Georgia Democrats.
It must be said: these appointments were not acts of sabotage, they were inherited artifacts of the prior administration, relics that had, perhaps through bureaucratic oversight, been allowed to persist longer than they should have.
The Trump administration, moving at a breakneck pace to secure cabinet confirmations, implement executive orders, and dismantle the administrative state’s more overt structures, may not have fully cleared the decks of every board and commission.
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