Washington (AP) — Vladimir Putin paid little attention to Russia’s preeminent US expert Fiona Hill when sitting next to him at dinner. The Putin people deliberately placed her there and chose the “obscure woman” as she said, so the Russian president had no competition to attract attention.
A Russian fluent, she carefully took in the conversation of a man who seemed to forget that she was there, and later wrote it down, recalled in an Associated Press interview. “Hey, if I were a man, you wouldn’t be talking this way in front of me,” she recalled. “But go ahead. I’m listening.”
Hill expected that when he later went to work for another world leader, Donald Trump, as a Russian adviser to the White House, he would not disappear as well. She could see in Putin’s head and co-authored a highly acclaimed book about him, but Trump didn’t want her advice either. He ignored her at the meeting after the meeting and once mistaken her for a secretary and called her “darling.”
Again, she was listening. She was reading Trump as she was reading Putin.
The result was her book, “There’s nothing here,” published last week. Unlike all other authors in the Trump administration, she is not obsessed with scandalous.like Her measured but fascinating testimony of Trump’s first impeachment, This book provides a cooler, and therefore perhaps more disturbing, portrait of the 45th President.
If the leech tone is suppressed, it’s terrible with a thousand cuts. It shows how a career devoted to understanding and managing Russia’s threats clashed with her revelation that the greatest threat to the United States comes from within.
In the details that hit the wall, she describes the president with a greedy desire for praise and little or no preference for governance. The flattering foreign leaders were in their remarks.
“From his staff and everyone in his orbit, Trump demanded constant attention and praise,” she writes. Especially in international affairs, “President’s vanity and fragile self-esteem were the points of serious vulnerability.”
Hill explains that Putin operates Trump by offering and withholding compliments.At a joint press conference in Finland Trump appeared on Putin’s side Hill almost lost it over his own intelligence on Russia’s intervention in the 2016 US presidential election.
“I wanted to get it all done,” she writes. “I thought about having a seizure or pretending to have a seizure and throwing myself into the line of journalists behind, but that would only have been added to the humiliating sight.”
But at Trump, she rarely saw the talent that was eventually wasted. He spoke the language of many average people, despised the same, manipulated without filters, liked the same food, and was willing to shred the boring norms of the elite. Trump was pitching his coal and steel work while Hillary Clinton was sipping champagne with a donor — at least that was an impression.
“He clearly felt what people wanted,” she told AP. “He was able to talk with their experience even if he couldn’t walk for a walk, but he understood that.”
But in her view, that skill was wasted. If it could have been used to mobilize people forever, it was instead used only for his own service — “Me the People” as the title of the chapter indicates.
Trump’s vanity was also destined His Helsinki meeting with Putin And the coveted arms control opportunity deals with Russia. The question at the press conference “became honest with the heart of his anxiety,” Hill wrote. If Trump agreed that Russia had interfered with the elections on his behalf, he might have said in his mind, “I am illegitimate.”
It was clear to Putin that the resulting backlash would undermine even the vague promises he and Trump had made. “On the way out of the door, he told his spokesman in the ear of our interpreter that the press conference was” bullshit. ” “Hill writes.
Trump praised Putin’s wealth, power and fame and, in Hill’s words, regarded him as the “ultimate villain.” In the course of his presidency, she writes, Trump will become more dictatorial and populist Russian leader than the recent American president.
Putin’s ability to manipulate the Russian political system and maintain power indefinitely was also impressive. “What does Trump look at it and don’t like about such a situation?” Hill told AP.
Republican Trump Impeached by House in late 2019 In his first efforts to take office in unconventional ways against trying to use his leverage against Ukraine to undermine his ultimate Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Riot at Parliament on January 6 By the mob he said, ” Fight like hell.. “
Hill was Russia’s Director of National Intelligence from early 2006 to late 2009 and was highly regarded in the Washington circle.But she was only during the impeachment trial Introduced to the public.. She undermined his defense by testifying that he had sent his envoy to Ukraine for “domestic political affairs” that had nothing to do with national security policy, against the president she served. Became one of the most damaging witnesses.
She began her testimony by explaining her unlikely journey as a coal miner’s daughter from a poor town in northeastern England to the White House. She also explained her desire to serve a country that “provided me an opportunity that I never had in England.”
Many of her new books extend the story told by her personal journey, self-deprecating humor and tenderness. In the process, Brookings Institution scholar Hill interweaves research into social changes that he has witnessed over decades as a British child, a Russian student and researcher, and ultimately a US citizen.
The changes in all three countries are significantly similar, partly due to the destruction of heavy industry. As a result, she calls it an “opportunity crisis,” allowing populist leaders such as Putin, Trump, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to take advantage of the fears and frustrations of left-behind emotions.
She said she entered the White House worried about what Russia was doing, saying, “I was watching all of this so much that the problem was actually the United States, and the Russians were just abusing everything. “.
Hill calls Russia a “ghost of the future of Christmas in America” if the United States cannot heal its political division.
Cheers from more civilian forms of politics, President Joe Biden “He’s kind of like standing alone, and people aren’t pulling behind him,” she said, trying to bring the country together and build its reputation abroad.
AP video journalist Nathan Elgren contributed to this report.
Copyright 2021 AP communication. all rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.
Fiona Hill, empty of Trump and Putin, saw both of them | National Affairs
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