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octoberlib

(14,971 posts)
Mon Jun 22, 2020, 03:59 PM Jun 2020

New Yorker article on Fiona Hill is excellent.I don't know how any woman could put up w/Trump's crap



By Adam Entous

June 22, 2020

Until that point, Hill said, she had always let her work speak for itself. But she had noticed that women in the West Wing wore designer dresses and more makeup. After the meeting, she went out and bought a few new outfits, “just so I wouldn’t be conspicuous in my dowdiness.” It was well known that Trump put inordinate stock in appearances, particularly when it came to women. “Central casting is a real thing for him,” a longtime Trump adviser told me. Trump addressed his female aides as “honey,” “sweetie,” and “darling.” If he didn’t like how an adviser looked, he would say, “Honey, you look so tired.” Trump would sometimes say of his female advisers, “They look O.K. in person, but on TV they look really bad. Why do they look so bad?”


After Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary, was interviewed on “60 Minutes,” Trump complained that she wasn’t attractive enough. When officials were discussing the possibility of a new position for Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Trump said he didn’t like how her cheeks looked. He complained to officials that Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, wasn’t sufficiently aggressive toward migrants—and she was too short. When Trump insulted a female adviser, the men in the room would look away. “It throws you off your game,” a former female adviser told me. “It deflates you.” Another former White House official, a man, told me that Trump was “rougher with women. He has a problem with women.” It was soon evident that Trump had a problem with Hill. “Forgive me, Fiona’s attractive, but he doesn’t trust women that are kind of non-players in his world,” the former official said. He added, “Anyone who takes notes is suspect.” A former national-security official told me that, after the incident in the Oval Office, some of Trump’s top advisers, including Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, began referring to Hill as “the Russia bitch.”

In the spring of 2017, Hill was reviewing Obama’s policies on Europe and Russia. His Administration had shunned the autocratic Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, who was thwarting efforts to build a united front within the E.U. and nato in support of Ukraine. Hill did not oppose a meeting between Trump and Orbán, but she wanted to make sure that Orbán was serious about changing his behavior. On May 23rd, Connie Mack, a former Republican congressman who was working as a lobbyist for Orbán, tried to persuade two of Mike Pence’s foreign-policy advisers to hold a Trump-Orbán summit at the White House. Trump had extended the invitation to Orbán by telephone in 2016; Mack wanted to know why the Obama policy remained in effect.

Mack told me, “It was clear that there was someone above who was saying ‘No meeting,’ and I knew it wasn’t Pence. So I started looking around, poking around, and I came across Fiona Hill’s name.” On the Brookings Web site, Mack discovered that Hill had worked with organizations that had ties to the Budapest-born financier George Soros, who is a frequent target of right-wing groups. Mack told Pence’s advisers that he believed that Hill was responsible for the holdup. According to an official who heard that conversation, Mack accused Hill of doing Soros’s bidding. On May 31st, the political operative Roger Stone, a longtime friend of Trump’s, appeared on Alex Jones’s television show, which traffics in far-right conspiracy theories. Stone told Jones, “This is very hard to believe, but I confirmed the facts again this morning. Soros has planted a mole infiltrating the national-security apparatus—a woman named Fiona Hill.” After the show aired, a woman called Hill’s house, and when her daughter picked up the phone the woman told her that her mother was “a cunt.” Hill started to receive death threats. In June, Mack began circulating a memo, titled “Fiona Hill Backgrounder,” to former congressional colleagues, documenting what he described as Hill’s purported links to “the Soros network.” Soon, one of Mack’s contacts told him that the memo was “in Trump’s hands.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/what-fiona-hill-learned-in-the-white-house

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New Yorker article on Fiona Hill is excellent.I don't know how any woman could put up w/Trump's crap (Original Post) octoberlib Jun 2020 OP
The entire Republican party operates like the Mafia. sop Jun 2020 #1
Trump has run a criminal enterprise for 40 years vlyons Jun 2020 #2
I still remember her testimony at the impeachment hearings manhattan123 Jun 2020 #3

sop

(9,946 posts)
1. The entire Republican party operates like the Mafia.
Mon Jun 22, 2020, 04:15 PM
Jun 2020

Trump is Il Capo di Tutti Capi, Barr is Consigliere, Pompeo and other Cabinet officials are the Capo Regime, all the way down to the police on the streets, "my soldiers."

manhattan123

(302 posts)
3. I still remember her testimony at the impeachment hearings
Mon Jun 22, 2020, 05:06 PM
Jun 2020

She was incredibly impressive.

So, of course, they got rid of her and Ambassador Yovanovitch.

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