There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

From his staff and everyone who came into his orbit, Trump demanded constant attention and adulation. When the press was invited into cabinet sessions, senior officials would compete to see who could outdo the others in praising Trump for the cameras. The president took note of those who didn’t, like defense secretary Jim Mattis, who always seemed to find some way of avoiding this exercise in self-debasement. The president’s vanity and fragile self-esteem were a point of acute vulnerability. He was a liability to himself and the country—a clear security or counterintelligence risk. It wasn’t just a question of the Russians or President Putin being able to manipulate or exploit him, as many commentators feared they would, given the events of 2016. Anyone at all, including the “average American,” the Twitter follower “on the street,” could influence him by deploying nothing more than basic flattery in public. No one needed something “on him” in terms of compromising information to blackmail Trump, although some former senior officials worried that the Kremlin had secured what the Russians called kompromat during his past trips to Moscow.