The Daily Beast Podcast - Fiona Hill: Putin Used His KGB Training to Manipulate Trump

Episode Date: October 10, 2021

Fiona Hill, former U.S. national security council specializing in Russia and U.S. relations and author of There's Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century, has examples that show the way Putin could have manipulated Trump in front of the world. Plus, she talks about poisoned Russian lawyer Alexei Navalny, the aftermath of her Trump impeachment testimony and who she says is flushing American values ““down the toilet.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another bonus edition of the New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with former U.S. National Security Council, expert, who specialized in Russian and European affairs, as well as the author of There's Nothing for You Here, Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, Fiona Hill. Welcome to the new abnormal, Fiona Hill. Hey, well, thank you so much for having me. Well, we're very excited to have you, and I don't know if we've had any guests where I've written about them so much, and then had them on the pod. But it's very, I'm a little starstruck.

Oh, I'm feeling the same way, actually. So there you are. Your testimony was such a sort of watershed moment for a lot of us. Can you talk to us a little bit about your testimony during the impeachment trial and how that was? I have to say I had no idea we'd have that kind of impact. I mean, in the days afterwards, I was stunned because, you know, my main focus was on showing up, telling the truth, answering all of the questions and really trying also at the same time

to get a message across about what a dangerous moment we were in where all the political parties andship was really jeopardising the US national security and so in the moment I wasn't thinking about all of the larger ramifications of this just making sure that I did the best possible job of answering all of the questions you know that was kind of what I was focused on

that was what I was preparing for and I wasn't really prepared for the aftermath Let's put it that way. It was like one of those times when testimony really does sort of speak to the larger feeling of, I think, American people, but also American women. Well, I guess everyone was feeling like me then, you know, because I was also in the moment feeling, you know, the same sets of concerns. And, you know, as I said, I really wanted to get those across as well as to answer the questions. Because, you know, I'd started to wonder what on earth was happening to us, polarization, the parties on infighting. I'd gone into the government, obviously, wanting to serve a country as an act of public service.

I mean, I'd already done this before, really worried about the Russians and what the Russians are done in 2016. And I came out wondering more where were we headed, the United States, and worried more about what we were doing to ourselves. Let's talk about Russia, because we had Alexei Navalny's chief of staff on last week. And he's very, I mean, kind of brave and amazing. And I'm just curious, like, how did you get to focusing on Russia and how has your concern changed? Well, first of all, Alex Sin Navalny is an amazingly amazingly brave person.

Yeah. And I think, you know, the reason that he's sitting in jail and the reason that the Kremlin clearly wanted to have him poisoned by putting a nerve agent, Novichok in his underpants of all things, just shows how dangerous they're seeing because he's somebody who's really stood up. to the dictatorship and authoritarian trends in Russia and has embarrassed Vladimir Putin. And so, you know, this is somebody to watch who's just done something quite incredible and is obviously suffering for it

and prepared to do so. That's another part of the astounding part of his bravery. He knew he was going to be in prison when he returned to Russia, but he was prepared to deal with the consequences. And this is, you know, kind of feeds into how I see that Russia has changed. So when I first went to Russia,

it was the Soviet Union in 1980, And I was struck immediately by how similar it was to the northeast of England and to my hometown, which sounds bizarre, because in many respects, Moscow was the first siege I'd ever lived in. And yet it looked like a giant version of my home area. You know, the Soviet Union was filled with working class blue-collar workers. It was all big, heavy smokestack industries. And it was a country that was sort of teetering on the edge of socioeconomic and later political collapse. And it was immediately apparent when I got there.

And so in the 1990s, the Soviet Union fell apart. Russia became a kind of a successor state and all of these other countries, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, the Baltic states all became independent countries out of that. And the Russians were basically contending with a feeling of loss, not just loss of the empire, but loss of a country and loss of their jobs and their well-being and their livelihoods. And all of that translated over a period of time into the rise of populist politics and the emergence of Vladimir Putin, who comes out of the KGB, was his pathward to opportunity. He started off in his own hardscrabble background in

St. Petersburg, what was then Leningrad, in a poor family living in a communal apartment. He joins the KGB and then he has this meteoric rise after the collapse of the Soviet Union to the top, the pinnacle of power to the Kremlin. And what he's done there is not kind of go back and, you know, try to serve the average Russian from where he came from. He's really just entrenched himself as an autocrite in the Kremlin and says he's going to be there until 2036. And that's kind of what worries me because Putin has set a pattern. In spite of lots of things he's actually done to help the country to Russia, putting it back in its feet, but set a pattern for others to emulate.

Yeah. And it seems like it's being emulated. Absolutely. I mean, this is what Donald Trump himself did. He wanted to be Putin. He saw Putin as the kind of epitome of the badass populist, frankly. You know, the kind of person that he wanted to be super rich, super powerful, no checks and balances, and essentially being able to stay in power forever.

And this is the kind of pattern of autocrats around the world that we see now. There's not much ideology behind it when they say it's their country first or their voters first. It's really all about them first, keeping themselves in a corrupt little clique around them in power. You write about Putin manipulating Trump because that is the thing that everyone for so long was like, what does Putin have on him? And I thought you had, you've said some pretty interesting stuff about that. Can you talk about that? Well, I mean, the thing is everyone was fixated on. thinking, well, Putin, obviously, from the KGB, must have a lot of information, compromising

information that he can, you know, blackmail Trump with. Well, that kind of compromising information, you know, investigative journalists in the United States have been unearthing as well, because Trump has been concealing his tax returns and all of his financial information and everybody else has been trying to ferret it out. You know, people say, oh, we might have got these tapes on, you know, improprieties of Trump in Moscow. Well, we've got the Axis Hollywood tapes. There's all kinds of stuff. Everyone's sort of locking on. always in the kind of obvious places. But what Trump has that, you know, Putin was able to exploit is an incredibly fragile, vulnerable ego. And Putin got his number, just like many other people

got his number. So Putin's got on Trump, what everybody else has on Trump, and he knows how to push his buttons and how to manipulate. He knows how to flatter him. And then he knows how to kind of rile him up like many other people do to, you know, make it look like somebody's insulting him and that Trump then has to act out defensively. So that that's a lot of. So that's a lot of, you know, That's what Putin has. He has the ability to know how to manipulate people from his training in the KGB and the knowledge of how to push people's buttons to kind of get them to behave in a way that he wants them to behave. He did this with the beautiful translator in this case, right? Yes. Well, I don't have that story in the book, but Stephanie Grisham, the former press secretary, relates it in hers. And I've been asked about this quite a few times. And I want to kind of give a larger context there, because first of all, this translator was super competent. She was really an excellent. translator, and she's one of the standard translators, but she wasn't on the roster to translate for Putin on that particular day. There was a guy on the roster who's also very good. You know, the Russian

protocol people changed it because they saw that Ivanka and others were also in the meeting in Osaka and Japan that Stephanie Grisham relates. And also then Putin made a big point, a big show of introducing Trump to the interpreter. And it was so obvious what he was trying to do is, like, oh, here's a really pretty woman. She also happens to be a brilliant interpreter. But, But it was clearly meant to get Trump to look at her and not to be paying attention to what Putin was saying. And of course, she has to translate what Putin is saying. And every translator tends to finesse a bit, you know, the rough edges off. And obviously a beautiful woman saying, you know, what Putin's really saying is more menacing way,

pushing all the buttons doesn't come across in the same way. So he was again setting the scene for more manipulation. It's fascinating. Were you surprised that the impeachment, cut on such partisan lines, the first one? Sadly not. And I mean, that's another reason for writing the book because, you know, as we moved towards that,

it was so obvious that people were dividing themselves out into these kind of tribal groupings. It's most disturbing to me today to read in opinion polls that the number one self-identification for a person in the United States is whether they're Democrat or Republican, blue or red.

I mean, as somebody who's, you know, came over to the United States, became a US citizen back in 1989, I find that mind-boggling. I understand it, but at the same time, I think what's happened to America? Because when I came here and I asked people about how they identified themselves was all kinds of different identities. I mean, that's what makes up the fabric of the vibrant place in America is. And I don't think, honestly, that the vast majority of people really identify themselves that way, but just they're forced to in this framing, because we've become so partisan in our politics and so polarized. You talk,

a lot about how you've sort of lived this American dream. Do you worry that it's not as accessible anymore? Yeah, that was another reason for writing the book, because I realized a lot of the benefits that I had in coming to the United States versus an immigrant, and in the timing in 1989, those faded away as time went on. So I came in my 20s. I had all these scholarships and grants. I graduated from all of my higher education with no educational debt whatsoever. I mean, how many people can do that these days? Particularly, you know, kids from a working class blue-collar background, even getting an education itself is difficult.

And also, if you're black and, you know, any other minority or disadvantaged grouping in America, it's incredibly hard to get ahead through education. And for me, doors were opened. And so I, you know, talk in the book about now education has become this bizarre class divide in the United States, you're more likely to vote one way over another, depending on whether you've had any higher education or not. And that, again, is also preposterous because for millions of people after World War II onwards, education was open, you know, to the vast majority. There was, of course, a racial bias in education, like the GI Bill after World War II wasn't open to black

Americans at first. But the idea was that education was there for everyone, and that's not the idea now. What are some of your policy solutions? Well, I think, they're fairly obvious, to be honest. I mean, I think the biggest problem we have in the United States now is not for want of policy fixes. It's the want of political will and collective action, because we're so polarised, we're fighting with each other all the time. And look, what's happening now with the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill on Capitol Hill. This is reflective of what the majority of Americans want. Everybody wants a hand-up. They don't want a hand-out. They want to be helped to get along. They want education. They want access to health care.

I mean, who wants to, like, you know, be saddled with healthcare debt and, you know, basically not being able to pay it. They want to have a roof over their head. They want to have a meal on the table. They want to have a better life for their kids. That's what people want. They shouldn't be labeled one way or another. And yet we're fighting ourselves about this. We're looking at wins for team red over team blue or vice versa. And we just can't, we're getting in our own way. We can't get anything done. So the policy prescriptions are, first of all, you know, kind of, we need to get through the heads of members of Congress that they're actually supposed to be serving the American people. It's not kind of playing game.

for their own power or for, you know, whatever guy is in the White House. But the other kind of message in the book is there's a lot that other people can do that we ourselves can do. I've got some ideas at the back of the book about how we can help close this opportunity back gap, how we can go out and try to encourage, you know, people to have further education, skills acquisition, you know, getting new qualifications in community colleges. It doesn't have to be an elite education. But, you know, we all have to kind of step up there and do things ourselves and help create networks to make that happen. And again, this is not kind of rocket science. It's all fairly straightforward. We all know what we need to do. We're all talking about it. Everybody knows Republican Democrats, ordinary people. It's just we have to find the collective action and the political will to get things done.

I want to ask you about your political piece from January about whether or not it was a coup. Yeah, it absolutely was a coup. I mean, what we saw happening in January 2020. And in fact, you know, for months previous. And I became convinced that, you know, this was. unfolding after the first impeachment trial because, you know, we heard more and more Trump making statements about wanting to stay in power indefinitely, and I relate some of that in the book. And, you know, what we see around the election is even before the election, he's basically saying the election's going to be stolen. He refuses to concede. He gets all the members of Congress for the Republican Party, except for a handful of, you know, very few people who actually stand up for their oaths of office and, you know, their commitment to their

constituents. basically to say he's won, or at least not to repudiate his lies. And we just keep on going. And it's basically what's the point of this is because he wants to stay in power indefinitely. And he wants to be able to come back again. He has not once said that he did not win the election in 2020. And he's allowed all of his supporters and forced congressional Republicans to say the same thing. And you have a lot of them now running for Secretary of State in some of these, in a lot of these states, some of which are swing states. if a person won't accept the results of that election, doesn't this seem like a recipe for disaster? It is a recipe for disaster. It's exactly what we see in so many other countries. And, you know, if people

want to live in the United States that, you know, I came to, you know, back in 1989 and I believe that most people do, they want to live in a country where, you know, life could be better for them and their kids, then we've got to stop that from happening because this is part of democracy. It's their rights are getting taken away from them. You know, we fought long and hard. Women have only had the vote for 100 years. You know, African Americans and Native Americans didn't get proper voting rights until actually around the year that I was born.

We're throwing all of this away. And people have got to go out there and, you know, tell everyone they can. Their neighbors, their friends, their family, look, we're at a point here where we're just throwing America down the toilet. You have dealt with a lot of different countries and you've dealt with Russia and you've seen the rise of authoritarianism. One party, the Republican Party, is completely anti-eastern. democratic, right? So they've given up, I mean, largely with a few exceptions, with anything but

Trumpism and this sort of Trump reality, how would you, I mean, if you saw us in another country, what would you do? Well, we'd be calling it out. I mean, the United States would be calling it out. That's, you know, what we've done. I mean, we've been trying to uphold democratic principles around the world, so we've got to call it out here too. And again, this is not partisan or ideological. It's just exactly as you expressed it. For a number of reasons that we all know. Basically, congressional Republicans have found themselves in the thrall of a charismatic populist in Donald Trump, who has actually repudiated the Republican Party. He said there is no such thing as the Republican Party. There's only the party of Donald Trump, the Republican

Party. So it's just Republican in name only. And he's gone after people within the Congressional Republican Party and elsewhere who have tried to call him out. So thank you so much for joining us. This was great. Oh, you're just amazing. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Molly. And look, it's very important to have you and others just continue to keep calling this out from the podcast. The most important thing is to tell, you know, people and get it across them. This is not partisan. This is not ideological. This is about the country that we live in. And, you know, as a non-partisan person, the more we can talk out about this, the more we can tell the truth, the more that we can, you know, engage and embrace our neighbors and friends and families and,

you know, get them to come along with us and speaking out about this, the better. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science, will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at

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