Top Advisor on Russia Fiona Hill says Trump started to ‘resemble Putin’ during his presidency

According to top advisor on Russia during former President Donald Trump’s time in office, Trump began to “resemble” Russian President Vladimir Putin as his term went on, and he started using Ukraine as a “plaything for his own purposes.”

In an interview with The New York Times Magazine released on Monday, Fiona Hill described what it was like to work under Trump and watch him interact with foreign leaders.

“In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors,” said Hill.

She went on to compare Trump to the presidents before him, emphasizing how meetings with George W. Bush in 2008 were quite different from her experience over the two years she served under Trump. 

Hill said that Bush, unlike Trump, read his briefing materials, adding that she was allowed to give opinions that were unpopular without being pushed out of the meeting. Instead, under Trump, it was tough to try and steer policy.

“It was extraordinarily difficult. Certainly, that was the case for those of us who were serving in the administration with the hopes of pushing back against the Russians, to make sure that their intervention in 2016 didn’t happen again. And along the way, some people kind of lost their sense of self,” Hill said.

After The Times released the article, Trump sent out a short statement on Twitter through his spokesperson Liz Harrington. “Fiona Hill is a Radical Left RINO, but the word RINO is too good. She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about. If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing,” Trump said, pointing to the acronym for the term “Republican In Name Only.”

He went on, “During the Impeachment Hoax #1, she had no credibility, obviously, because we won unanimously. Never listened to her, I hardly knew her at all. She knew nothing about me, I knew nothing about her, and I liked it that way.”