Foreign Affairs’ summer reading kicks off with an essay by Fiona Hill on how Russian President Vladimir Putin exploits the vulnerabilities of American democracy.
Welcome to Foreign Affairs Summer Reads. For the next three months, we’re sharing some of our favorite essays from the archives that provide rare first-person accounts of history as it unfolded. We start this week with Fiona Hill’s 2021 essay on her experience advising U.S. President Donald Trump on Russia—and why her time in the White House led her to fear that Russian-style populism, cronyism, and corruption were taking their toll on American democracy. At the time of writing, it had been two years since Hill left the White House. By then, Joe Biden was in office, but Trump’s impact on relations with Russia had proved lasting. As a presidential adviser, Hill witnessed firsthand Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin—and his emulation of the Russian president’s will to power. She was sitting in front of the podium at the infamous July 2018 press conference in Helsinki when Trump told the world that he believed Putin’s claim that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, contradicting American intelligence agencies. “I contemplated throwing a fit or faking a seizure and hurling myself backward into the row of journalists behind me,” Hill wrote of that moment. “I just wanted to end the whole thing.” By the time she left the Trump administration in the summer of 2019, Hill was alarmed by what she saw as the convergence of U.S. and Russian politics—and feared that Trump’s approach to governing helped Moscow exploit the vulnerabilities of American democracy. Hill’s essay was adapted from her memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century.
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