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

by Fiona Hill

Nigel Farage in the UK and Donald Trump in the U.S. both fit Putin’s populist mold. They were charismatic leaders who dealt in pithy slogans that offered promises, not programs. Populists deal exclusively in “us” versus “them.” In their depiction, they are the only political leaders who can possibly fix tough issues. They always present themselves as the champions of “the people.” Populists like Trump and Farage offered quick and simple solutions for complex problems.

The Brexit and Trump platforms were heavy on fearmongering and blame-shifting and light on the sort of detailed policy agendas that might actually stand a chance of fixing these deep-rooted socioeconomic challenges.

Throughout history, populists have offered compelling narratives for people who feel they have lost their identities and cultural moorings as well as their jobs in an economic downturn and at times of rapid social change and political uncertainty.

Populists like Putin provide straightforward, plain-speaking explanations for people’s misfortunes. They offer scapegoats, like corrupt bureaucrats and conniving immigrants, or the West trying to keep Russia down, in Putin’s case. They produce memorable catchphrases that encapsulate the ambitious claims that they, and only they, can solve “the people’s” problems and ease their cultural despair. “The people” is also who they say it is—not everyone, just a specific group that they define. This group of “their people” (nashi, or “ours” in Russian) is then divided against the rest of society.

Labels proliferate.

Populism is as much about a leader’s personal style as it is anything approximating a political belief system. In 2016, both Farage and Trump figured out how to make a direct connection with voters through the media. Trump was especially adept at using Twitter and other social media platforms as a direct (and nonstop) means of communication with voters. As president he invented “policy by tweet,” bypassing formal press releases and other presidential messaging norms. His tweets were devoid of complicated language and often verifiable facts. Instead they were heavy on assertion and declarative style, with all capitals and lots of exclamation marks.

He was far more successful playing a businessman on TV than he had actually been in real life.

They did not anticipate that Trump would instead—as he in fact did over the entire four years of his presidency—endlessly obsess about himself and how other people were treating or mistreating him.

But saying he was going to do something proved easier than actually doing something.

I soon would have the opportunity to observe firsthand—over and over again—that Trump was far more interested in seizing the opportunity to claim credit and say he had done “amazing things” for people, things that “nobody had ever done before,” than in engaging in the hard work necessary for real accomplishments.

It was no matter that Trump was rich and had a lifestyle that could not have been more different from theirs, or that he had inherited his company from his father.

Stories about Trump’s frequent bankruptcies and unscrupulous business practices were dismissed by his supporters as efforts to defame or discredit him.

With the Mueller investigation ongoing behind the scenes, Democrats and Republicans in Congress constantly fought over the outcome of the election and Russia’s role in it. As a result of focusing on the Russians, they generally ignored the genesis of the domestic political divisions that had shaped such a contentious election in the first place and propelled Trump to the presidency. This was a major mistake as far as the country’s future was concerned.

In circumstances where millions of people feel marginalized and mainstream political parties have no evident solutions, populists fill the vacuum.

In Trump’s worldview, everyone was self-serving. People always did something for a reason—power, money, lust, fame. And countries, by extension, operated in the same way. They should put themselves first, like he did.

As president, Trump was always camera-ready in full makeup. White House press conferences, “exclusive” interviews with selected journalists, and public rallies put him at the center of national attention. When any political opponent or sometimes even a cabinet member held an event, Trump arranged a competing event or sent off a flurry of provocative tweets to draw the media’s and public’s attention away. If he had nothing to talk about, he would manufacture a scandal or a crisis to get everyone talking about him.

The political machinations around the Trump White House turned out to be as dirty and filled with intrigue as the Kremlin’s,

resolved to see what I could do to help tackle the Russian intelligence services’ attack on American democracy.

What did surprise me in real life was that he hadn’t really changed his worldview since the 1980s, even after all the things that had happened in the years since.

Back in the 1980s, Trump had proffered himself as Reagan’s arms control negotiator in magazine interviews. He had bragged that he could easily reach a deal if he just got the chance to sit down with Gorbachev. In 1990 he told Playboy Magazine that nuclear war was the “ultimate catastrophe” and he personally wanted to do something about it. He had been sixteen during the trauma of the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s and had then had to contemplate the rerun of a war scare in the 1980s. Trump had an uncle who was a nuclear physicist at MIT, so by some process of family and genetic osmosis, he believed he already fully understood the issue.

He’d got this far in business and in politics by following his own instincts. He knew everything he needed to know.

Trump was also suspicious of people taking notes, K. T. explained. He thought they were reporting on him.

Trump, she said, always noticed what women were wearing and what they looked like.

Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and some others had started to refer to me as “the Russia bitch.”

Trump fixated on how women looked on TV as well as in person. If they were having an off day or had some physical feature—height, weight, the appearance of their hair or skin—that he didn’t like, he would point it out to others and to their face in public. Trump would frequently berate and belittle female aides, including senior women, in front of their male counterparts—none of whom would intercede on their behalf. Just being a woman became an obstacle to getting their job done.

In fact, if there were women whom Trump did consider players, odds were that they were somehow connected to Fox News. The cable news channel was beamed into the workplace 24/7 on the complex’s ubiquitous TV screens. It was so intertwined with the day-to-day operations of the White House that President Trump frequently tied his opening remarks with visitors—foreign and domestic—to something he had just seen on a Fox News program.

At one point, during a supposedly serious meeting in the Oval Office with U.S. ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman to discuss how to approach Putin before their first summit meeting, in Helsinki in 2018, Trump spontaneously called the ambassador’s daughter, Abby Huntsman. She was then the cohost of one of the president’s favorite Fox News programs, Fox & Friends Weekend. I was sitting next to Ambassador Huntsman along with Russia director Joe Wang and presidential chief of staff John Kelly. We had barely got into the discussion when this idea popped into the president’s head. It was obvious that he wasn’t interested in hearing any advice about Putin, even from someone as distinguished as Ambassador Huntsman, a former governor of Utah, ambassador to China, and presidential candidate. The ambassador, Joe Wang, and I had all huddled with Ambassador Bolton in advance to make the most of the rare opportunity to have Ambassador Huntsman in the Oval. The chance to make some pertinent points was immediately out the window. All President Trump was interested in was schmoozing with Abby Huntsman on the phone to catch up on the latest from Fox News. Ambassador Huntsman could hardly say no to the call. We never got the meeting back on track.

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.

Leaders were paying tribute to him, not to the country.

We had to compile this material before a visit as part of the briefing package. When someone was caught in the act of making some negative comment, he or she would end up on Trump’s “nasty list.” We were instructed to exclude them from meetings during foreign trips.

In the meantime, press and online commentators fused us together as one Fiona Hill, simultaneously working for the UK prime minister and the American president.

Sometimes the president took bizarre turns into rambling monologues completely lacking in substance. It was becoming clear that this was how the man who had ridden into the White House on the grievances of ordinary Americans was going to fritter away his time in office—forcing captive audiences to indulge him as he went off on personal tangents.

It was an easy slide from Donald Trump’s sometimes perverse machismo and personalization of the presidency into something more malign than benign. His time in office would come to mark not only the contours of the rise of populism in the United States but also the emergence of a definite authoritarian streak in American executive power. Although his behavior sometimes seemed more malevolent than it actually was, his penchant for strongman tactics—and for strongmen themselves—cast a pall over America, diminishing its standing on the world stage and foreclosing the possibility that some good could come out of his administration in addition to all the chaos and strife.

Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.

But behind this flashy showmanship there was a darker kind of substance. Under Trump, the United States began to develop its own version of “the people who run the country own it,” which was a description applied to Russia by the Carnegie Moscow program head Dmitri Trenin. In populist settings you frequently end up with crony capitalism. Those who have personal ties get preferential treatment and rise to the top of the economy. The grabbing hand of state becomes the grabbing hand of the head of state. Personalized leadership tilts the playing field away from good governance and the true private sector toward corruption and nepotism. In the public realm, the focus is on the political—creating jobs for “your” voters, which is something Trump always said he wanted to do. Inevitably, cronyism bolsters the desire for authoritarianism, retaining power by any means to keep you and yours in charge of the state and its spoils. In the end, this trend leads to economic stagnation. Democracy and growth are clearly correlated in Europe as well as in the United States. When democracy slides, so does the economy.

In sum, Putin’s approach was a stark contrast to Trump’s efforts to emphasize America’s divides and pit political parties, politicians, social movements, and racial and religious groups against each other in 2016 and 2020. Putin wanted one Russia. Trump wanted many Americas, not one. This was a telling difference, and a critical one, because Vladimir Putin was only too happy to unleash the Russian security services to exploit America’s divisions, playing up the many Americas and playing them against each other, all with the goal of weakening the United States. In this respect, Trump played right into Putin’s hands.

This was the kind of head-spinning, incoherent monologue that I had tried on numerous occasions to document for the presidential record as notetaker. It was a word fog, in which you stumbled around looking for meaning. Somewhere in the haze, however, President Trump had said that he believed Putin over his intelligence officials. The telling lines for me were that “Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial” and “He just said it’s not Russia [so] I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

As far as Trump was concerned, standing there in Helsinki in July 2018, the media had tried to embarrass him and make him look weak. Journalists, American government officials, intelligence analysts—none of these people were his audience, nor were they his peers. Only Putin was.

As Trump responded that he believed Putin over his own intelligence analysts, I wanted to end the whole thing. I contemplated throwing a fit or faking a seizure and hurling myself backward into the row of journalists behind me. But it would only have added to the humiliating spectacle.

Angela Merkel struck a chord by channeling the 1980s for Eighties Man.

From my perspective, Masha was the victim of a long, drawn-out professional political mugging. It turned out that this had been directed since 2018 by two Ukrainian Americans, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who had business interests in Ukraine that they thought she was blocking.

Parnas’s and Fruman’s comments had no basis in fact whatsoever, but they got an instant and chilling response from Trump: “Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it.” Ambassador Yovanovitch had shamed him—or at least the idea of her saying something negative had shamed him. The fabricated comments made him lose face in front of White House insiders. He didn’t question whether or not they were true. Parnas and Fruman were donors, they were in his peer circles, they were instantly believed—just as Putin would be at Helsinki a few months later. The object of offense, the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine, would have to be taken out.

At times like this I felt like Alice in Wonderland watching the Queen of Hearts constantly calling “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” whenever someone displeased her. The children’s author Lewis Carroll had family ties to County Durham, and I had been steeped in his books as a kid. Now I felt I was living them.

At the end of May 2017, I featured on Infowars, the website run by the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that ruined many an ordinary American’s life by targeting them, including the grieving families of children killed in school shootings, which Jones declared “government hoaxes.” I was excoriated by Jones and Trump’s adviser Roger Stone in a lengthy segment in which they “unmasked” me as George Soros’s mole in the White House. Apparently I was in cahoots with General McMaster in a plot against the president. I eventually learned that this attack had originated with a former Republican congressman from Florida, Connie Mack. He was now a lobbyist working for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Mack had sold me out to Roger Stone as part of his efforts to secure Orbán his meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office.

But here were hundreds of often anonymous strangers, egged on by Alex Jones and Roger Stone, calling for me to be harmed and even killed, with no accountability whatsoever.

I now knew at first hand that this was the way that Trump and some (although not all) of the people in his circle pressed their agendas. They traded in disinformation and weaponized it, just like the Soviets had during the Cold War and Putin still did in Russia. “Soros Mole” was a particularly useful label. Once applied, it could bring someone down.

After the Infowars episode, I started to pay close attention to how “Soros Mole” was used. Others noticed too. In early 2019, while I was still at the White House, BuzzFeed News published an article laying out the origins of the “Soros conspiracy.” It had originated in 2008, when two prominent political consultants in New York, Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, were recruited by Viktor Orbán to assist his political campaign. They had previously worked for Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, who was friendly with Orbán. Netanyahu recommended them.

Finkelstein and Birnbaum decided they should create an external political enemy to help Orbán mobilize support for his bid to become Hungarian prime minister. They selected Soros, a prominent Hungarian Jew whose family had fled Budapest during the Holocaust. Soros was both famous and controversial, and still connected to Hungary. He funded a range of nonprofit organizations and educational institutions there and had even provided a scholarship for Orbán early in his career. It was not a complete stretch to suggest that Soros had now turned against Orbán and was trying to pull political strings to control the country from abroad, all for disreputable left-wing purposes. The Soros ploy was successful. Orbán won the ballot and became prime minister. Soros became his permanent political foil, rolled out at every election. Finkelstein and Birnbaum then refreshed the Soros c...

No matter who invented the Soros conspiracy myth, its content and propagation followed the pattern of a classic, historical anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that was also specifically devised for political ends, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols was a fabricated document circulated in the early 1900s, outlining a long-running Jewish plot to subvert European governments. The basic ideas of the plot were pulled from a number of sources, including a pamphlet attacking Napoleon III in France in the 1860s. The document was often used as the basis for anti-Jewish purges and pogroms in czarist Russia. It was still widely in print in the West as well as in Russia. On a trip in the Russian provinces a few years earlier, I had seen copies for sale in church bookstores.

Ambassador Cornstein knew all about the origins of the Soros conspiracy. In fact, he confirmed the details in the BuzzFeed article for me. Soros’s political activity in support of left-wing causes was the focus of the fabrication. It was just politics. Not serious, he said. It wasn’t even particularly personal. Orbán had no reason to hate Soros. I noted that I had received death threats because of my long-ago association with Soros, which felt pretty personal at the time. There were hundreds, if not thousands, more threats against Soros on the internet, many referring to him as a Jew, and in October 2018 someone sent a pipe bomb to his house. Ambassador Cornstein conceded that this was unfortunate, of course, but Finkelstein and Birnbaum could hardly be to blame for other people’s anti-Semitic attitudes. In Viktor Orbán’s case, all he wanted was to be elected and reelected. The Soros conspiracy was ingenious, and it worked.