Beware of Trump’s tricks in Europe
In September 2019, when the news broke that president Donald Trump would suspend financial support to Ukraine unless president Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to dig up dirt about Joe Biden and his son, Trump’s Russia and Europe adviser Fiona Hill happened to be in the UK, visiting her mother.
Washington was in shock. Many people tried to reach Hill: a president abusing his office to get at his rival, how could that happen? Did she know more?
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For decades, the US and the UK have starved education, health care and other public services that gave disadvantaged people the chance of a better life
But Hill was virtually unreachable. Her mother lived in Bishop Auckland, a former mining town in the forgotten northeast of the UK.
In her recent book, There is Nothing for You Here; Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, she writes: “You couldn’t easily telework from a place like Bishop Auckland. None of the infrastructure was there, unless you could afford to install it yourself. My mother certainly couldn’t, and her wifi – if you could even call it that – was barely functional.
“At her house, if I wanted to make a cell-phone call, I had to walk to the back of the garden and stand on top of the compost heap. I could never download all my email messages. As a result, I missed the drama back in the United States (including the release of the transcript of President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Zelensky) that would lead me to testify before Congress.”
Some people in Washington are furious with Fiona Hill, the little known civil servant who became world-famous overnight with her cool testimony during the hearings for Trump’s impeachment in late 2019.
No one questions her competence. But her assertion that she was merely a neutral civil servant rings shallow.
She was a political appointee who worked in the White House for a year-and-a-half with Trump loyalists John Kelly and John Bolton without complaining, even though Trump completely ignored her – only to spill the beans when she was called to testify at the 11h hour.
Still, her book is interesting.
It describes how, as an underprivileged coal miner’s daughter, she made her way up all the way “from the coal house to the White House”. Her background provides the lens through which she looks at Trump, at president Vladimir Putin, and at the Brexiteers in her country of birth.
She does not care much for them, but she instinctively understands people who voted for Trump or for the UK to leave the European Union. Her own father, an unskilled miner, lost his job, his dignity and his entire social support system in the 1970s, when many pits closed in the UK.
In Russia, many of those who suffered most from the transition in the 1990s continue to support the Putin system. The same can be said of steel workers in Ohio who voted for Trump in 2016.
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