Liu Jie/Xinhua/Getty Images
- Former NSC official Fiona Hill's new memoir sheds new light on her time in the Trump White House.
- Hill says foreign autocrats would become angry when Trump displayed his lack of knowledge.
- "Everyone knew that Trump never paid attention to his brief," Hill said.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Former Trump advisor Fiona Hill says that autocratic foreign leaders often became agitated with former President Donald Trump when his lack of knowledge on major issues became apparent during meetings - despite often using his ignorance to their advantage.
Hill, who served as the Senior Director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council before departing in July 2019, recounted the exchanges in her new memoir "There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century." Hill later served as a key witness during the House impeachment inquiry into Trump's dealings with Ukraine and efforts to pressure the Ukrainian president into launching inquiries into the Bidens.
"Some leaders, like President Erdogan of Turkey, would get angry in meetings or on calls when Trump obviously had no idea what they were talking about," Hill wrote in the book.
Hill also said that "everyone knew that Trump never paid attention to his brief," which emboldened autocratic foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to make inaccurate claims during their engagements with Trump.
"Trump's failure to read his briefs or to stick to the policy plan (even if he had come up with it in the first place) was a major liability in every aspect of national security affairs," she wrote. "Whenever he got to meetings and the conversation started, it seemed like the first time he was hearing things from world leaders."
This lack of preparation, she said, was an opportunity for foreign autocrats to get the better of Trump and denigrate his staff. Erdogan would intentionally call Trump when he thought his "bad American advisers" weren't around, bypassing the NSC and other White House staff to engage with the president directly.
"Trump gave Putin or whoever was with him the opportunity to promote his own version of history and events and seize the policy advantage," she wrote. "If his foreign visitor of caller was one of his favored strongmen, he would always give him the benefit of the doubt over his advisors."
Hill recounted one exchange with Orbán in which Trump cut off his own defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, in order to accept an argument the Hungarian leader had already made, part of a pattern of deferring to foreign leaders.
"The autocratic leader simply had more authority than the people who worked for Trump. The leader was his equal, his staff members were not," she wrote. "He would listen only to someone he considered to be at his level, or close to it."
She said this approach was particularly disastrous at the former president's July 2018 summit with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, where Trump asked "Vladimir" to "repeat what you just told me to my guys" in a delegation after the two leaders' private sit-down.
Trump during a press conference at the Helsinki summit appeared to accept Putin's word that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election, and effectively sided with the Russian leader over the US intelligence community in the process.
At the time, Trump said he didn't see "any reason" why Russia would interfere in the US electoral process and that Putin was "extremely strong and powerful in his denial" of any meddling.
He faced bipartisan criticism back in Washington over the Helsinki summit, which reportedly sent the CIA into "panic mode," and later attempted to walk back on his comments.
During an interview with the BBC back in February, Hill said she considered doing something dramatic to disrupt the disastrous press conference. "My initial thought was just 'How can I end this?' I literally did have in my mind the idea of faking some kind of medical emergency and throwing myself backwards with a loud blood-curdling scream into the media," Hill said.
source https://www.businessinsider.com/fiona-hill-foreign-autocrats-angry-trump-ignorance-putin-erdogan-orban-2021-10