Fiona Hill

you know, maybe it's the real estate developer in him that was, you know, taking a big wrecking ball to all of these kinds of, you know, sacred edifices and things like that.

But often, if you really paid attention, he was asking a valid set of questions about why do we continue to do things like this.

Now, we didn't often have answers about what he was going to do in response, but those questions still had to be asked.

And we shouldn't be just rejecting them, you know, out of turn.

The one bit when it doesn't work is when they start name-calling.

You know, kind of inciting violence against, you know, the people that we disagree with.

So that was kind of your problem.

Because, I mean, often when I was in the administration, I had all of Europe in my portfolio as well as Russia.

And there were many times when, you know, we were dealing with our European colleagues where...

he was asking some pretty valid questions about, well, why should we do this if you're doing that?

For example, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the United States has been opposed to Europe's reliance on gas and oil exports from Russia, the Soviet Union, since the 70s and 80s.

And Trump kept pushing this idea about, so why are we spending so much money on NATO and NATO defense?

And we're all talking about this.

If you're then basically paying billions to Russia for gas, isn't this contradictory?

And of course it was.

But it was the way that he did it.

And I actually, you know, one instance had a discussion with a European defence minister.

He said to me, look, he's saying exactly the same things as people said before him, including, you know, former defence secretary Gates.

It's just the way he says it.

You know, so they took offence.