Fiona Hill

He didn't have any kind of diversity of thought.

And when systems go awry, it's when they don't bring in different perspectives.

And so, you know, Trump, if he brought in different perspectives and actually listened to them and not just, you know, believed that he himself knew better than anyone else and then tried to divide everybody against each other, it would have been a different matter.

It's a tragedy of a completely and utterly lost set of opportunities because of the flaws in his own nature.

Because, I mean, again, there was all kinds of things that he could have done to shake things up.

And so many people around him remained completely disappointed.

And, of course, he divided and pitted people against each other, you know, creating so much factualism in American politics that, you know, people have forgotten they're Americans.

They think that they're red or blue, you know, parts of teams.

And, you know, if you go back over history, that's kind of a recipe for war and, you know, internal conflict.

You go back to, you know, the Byzantine Empire, for example.

There's the famous episode of the Niki Riots.

uh in uh constantinople where the whole uh city gets trashed because the greens the reds the blues and these various sporting teams in the hippodrome get whipped up by political forces and they you know they pull the place apart and that's you know kind of where we've been heading on some of these trajectories but the other point is when you look back

You know, Bush and Obama as well, there's a very narrow circle of decision making.

You know, Bush period, it's the focus on the executive branch with Dick Cheney as the vice president being very fixated on it.

And Obama, it's, you know, he and, you know, kind of the bright young things around him, you know, from he himself is, you know, kind of intellectually intelligent.

You know, one might say arrogant in many respects.

You know, he was a very smart guy.

And, you know, he's convinced that he has and he ruminates over a lot of things.

But he's the person who makes a lot of decisions.

And basically, George W. Bush used to call himself the decider as well, right?