Fiona Hill Doesn’t Think the Russians Had Anything on Trump

Fiona Hill’s unflinching testimony about President Trump using Ukraine for a “domestic political errand” to undermine a political rival made the British-born scholar an instant feminist icon. One of the final and most memorable “fact witnesses” in Trump’s first impeachment trial, she shone a light on non-partisan public servants like herself as she set out in riveting detail the parallel tracks of a White House going through the motions of advancing the nation’s interests while exploring deals to advance Trump’s self-interest and ensure his re-election.

“Essentially, he was promoting national security for his family – and a foreign policy to fit his own personal ambitions and world view,” Hill says. “It’s not We the People – it’s Me the People,” a phrase she invokes repeatedly in her new memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here, a title that draws on her experience growing up in an impoverished town in northern England, the daughter of a coal miner.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Hill called the ex-president “a counter-intelligence and national security risk because he was so vulnerable to manipulation based on the fragility of his ego.” She recalled Trump’s “nasty list,” a growing number of people who ticked him off in ways large and small. She was shocked that a man raised in such luxury, who’d never been denied anything, could be so insecure. “Anyone could induce him to do something by raising the specter of someone insulting him—or by praising him. His ideology was idolatry,” she said.

She dismisses the widely held belief that animated much of our politics for four years, that Vladimir Putin had some damning revelation on Trump that prompted the American president’s wildly excessive deference to his Russian president.

Before Trump met with Russian President Putin in Helsinki in July of 2018, he asked Hill if she thought Putin would like him. “But I never had the time to answer before he was on to something else,” she said. “From Putin’s view, what’s not to like? What Putin had on Trump is what everybody else had—recognition of his extreme vulnerability to manipulation.”

Various foreign leaders, from France’s Emmanuel Macron to the Saudis, figured out early how susceptible Trump was to flattery, she said. Trump suffered from “autocrat envy,” pandering to Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, China’s Xi Jinping, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “He also really liked kings and queens,” she adds. And Putin of course, whom Trump wanted to call to thank personally after the Russian president said something nice about him on television.

Fiona Hill was an unlikely recruit for the Trump team. A highly credentialed academic from working class northern England with an advanced degree from Harvard, she had spent the day after Trump’s inauguration at the Women’s March in Washington. She was as surprised as her colleagues at the Brookings Institution, an elite…