Interview with Fiona Hill.
In her view populist governments are useless at handling complex problems of governance, almost by definition. If leaders are fit to govern, they generally don’t need populism to get elected.
“It’s all about style and swagger and atmospherics, with superficial solutions to things, with lots of sloganeering, and obviously dealing with a pandemic is pretty methodical and boring. It requires an awful lot of planning and logistical organization and you can’t just sort of do it on the fly with an ad hoc coalition.”
What interests Hill is how the three such different countries end up in the same boat, run by populists and significantly less able to cope with a pandemic than their neighbours. She believes the critical common factor is the heady rise, and then the catastrophic collapse, of heavy industry and the failure of their governments to manage the fall and cushion the impact on their people.
She remembers only having her running shoes on, having left home in a rush, leaving her work shoes behind, and trying to hide her feet under her chair. She need not have worried.
“Trump didn’t look up when I came in and I don’t think he looked up the whole time I was giving my spiel about the terrorist attack,” Hill said. The president was busy writing something on a pad on his desk. “And then Ivanka came in and sat down next to me, the first thing she did was look at my shoes.”
The next meeting with Trump was even worse. McFarland tried to introduce her to the president in a crowded room and tell him she was his senior director for Russia, but Trump just waved towards the secretary of state.
“He said: Rex Tillerson is working on Russia, and I thought: this is not going to work,” she recalled. “I never really imprinted.”
That much was clear on her next visit to the Oval Office. Trump was making a call with Putin, and as is customary, relevant White House officials were sitting around the president’s desk.
Hill had listened to what the Russian president had said and was preparing some notes of analysis, when she suddenly became aware everyone was looking at her. Trump had decided he wanted a press release and assumed Hill, one of the few women in the room, was there to type it up.
“The president thought I was part of the executive secretariat taking notes,” she said. “He was basically saying: ‘Can she go do this?’ and I had no idea what they’re talking about. I was like a deer in the headlights, and thinking: You’re talking to me?
And the Kremlin was constantly outmanoeuvring the White House, arranging events so that Trump would be alone with Putin with only the Russian president’s translator in the room. The state department, which stuck to rigid protocol rules on whose translator should be where and when, was being played.
“Putin doesn’t operate like that. Putin takes translators with him for every occasion,” she said. “The Russians are incredibly organized. They take advantage of every opportunity, every vulnerability, every open door they can walk through.”
In her efforts to have US career officials included in Trump’s meetings with Putin, she found herself facing determined resistance from inside the president’s entourage, as they became more and more distrustful of career officials as disloyal potential whistleblowers.
“I was saying to the people around him it’s the president’s own security here, because then they [the Russians] can say that he said things that he didn’t say. And they did that repeatedly,” she said. “They could be recording things in big meetings like the G20 where we don’t control the site. It gave Russians unnecessary leverage, and made it much more difficult for us to get ahead of things.”
