This Is Exactly What Susan Rice Feared
A few days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice held a press briefing in her office to talk about the threats she saw on the horizon as Barack Obama’s presidency drew to a close. “What keeps you up at night? one reporter asked toward the end of the meeting. Her answer: a pandemic that spirals out of control.
Yesterday afternoon, I asked Rice how the past five months have compared to what she’d been worried about in the early days of 2017. “This is about in the realm of my worst nightmare,” she told me. That’s why, Rice said, she worked to put together plans, and why she oversaw the creation of the pandemic-preparedness office that Trump famously closed. “We knew it was going to happen. We just couldn’t know when.”
Rice criticized the current administration’s handling of the pandemic, saying there are “absolutely many more Americans dead because of Donald Trump’s failed leadership.” Our conversation can be heard in full on the latest episode of The Ticket.
These days, Rice isn’t speaking just as a former national security adviser and a former United Nations ambassador, or an author whose memoir, , just happens to have come out in paperback at the beginning of August. Rice is
