Former President Donald Trump tried so hard to emulate Russian President Vladimir Putin while in office.
“He saw Putin as the kind of epitome of the badass populist, frankly, you know, the kind of person that he wanted to be: super-rich, super powerful, no checks and balances, and essentially being able to stay in power forever,” Fiona Hill tells Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal.
But according to the former U.S. national security council official specializing in Russian and U.S. relations, the relationship was and is one-sided.
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Hill tells Molly that she’s confident Putin used his KGB experience to manipulate Trump. There are even public examples of it, like the time Putin got a woman to be his interpreter for one of their meetings.
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“Putin made a big point, a big show of introducing Trump to the interpreter. Here’s a really pretty woman. She’s also a brilliant interpreter, but it was clearly meant to get Trump to look at her and not to be paying attention to what Putin was saying,” she says.
Hill also opens up about what it was like to testify at Trump’s impeachment hearing and the aftermath of it: “In the moment I wasn’t thinking about all of the larger ramifications of this, just making sure that I did the best possible job of answering all of the questions, you know, that was kind of what I was focused on. That was what I was preparing for. And I wasn’t really prepared for the aftermath.”
Plus, she has major thoughts on the current state of U.S. affairs, which is a bit about what her latest book, There’s Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century, touches on.
Point blank, Trumpism is flushing American democracy and everything great about it “down the toilet.” She says she was worried about Russia’s influence in 2016, but after, “I worried more about what we were doing to ourselves.”
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