There are few political figures who can generate a full-blown Thanksgiving argument while technically holding zero elected office.
The former National Security Advisor and UN Ambassador has been out of the White House since 2017, yet she remains a permanent resident of conservative group chats and liberal think-piece discourse alike.
For the uninitiated: Rice spent the Obama years as UN Ambassador and then National Security Advisor, two jobs that basically involve explaining complicated foreign policy to people who will ignore it anyway.
She was on the shortlist for Secretary of State and VP, got passed over both times, and then got to watch everyone argue about it online for three years.
Her greatest hits include the 2011 Benghazi talking points saga, which spawned approximately 47 congressional hearings and zero convictions, and the 2017 "unmasking" controversy, where she asked to see the identities of Americans caught up in foreign surveillance.
Everyone called it a Tuesday on cable news.
Then came the 2020 election, where Rice's name floated for VP before Kamala Harris got the nod.
Rice responded with the political equivalent of "I'm flattered, but I have a couch to sit on." She's since become a commentator and occasional Twitter lightning rod, which is a nice way of saying she gets yelled at by strangers for a living now.
What's genuinely fascinating is how Rice became a Rorschach test for the entire political spectrum.
To one side, she's a competent diplomat unfairly maligned by partisan witch hunts.
To the other, she's the embodiment of everything wrong with the "deep state" — a phrase that sounds ominous until you realize it just means "career government employees." She's also, notably, one of the few Black women to hold such senior national security roles, a fact that tends to get glossed over in the yelling.
Rice has a memoir, "Tough Love," and a reputation for being both fiercely loyal and occasionally tone-deaf.
She once told an interviewer she was "not a fan" of the phrase "shithole countries" being attributed to Trump, which is the most diplomatic way anyone has ever addressed that particular quote.
She's also been floated as a possible future candidate for something, which she keeps declining, which somehow makes people want her more.
The internet's obsession with Rice says more about us than about her.
She's a convenient stand-in for the Obama era, for the Clinton machine, for the foreign policy establishment, for whatever grievance is trending that week.
She hasn't held power in nearly a decade, yet she's still the villain in someone's Facebook post and the hero in someone else's op-ed.
That's not a political career — that's a brand.
Honestly, Rice deserves either a real comeback or a real retirement, not this eternal purgatory of being a cable news punching bag.
Final Thoughts
But since American politics runs on recycled grudges, expect to hear her name again in 2028.