'Democracy Is Done' If Trump Wins White House In 2024, Warns Fiona Hill

Fiona Hill, a former top analyst on the National Security Council, presented a chilling warning about Donald Trump in a Politico interview Friday: If Trump “makes a successful return to the presidency in 2024, democracy’s done.”

“I feel like we’re at a really critical and very dangerous inflection point in our society,” said Hill, who bares revelations about Trump and America in her book “There Is Nothing for You Here.”

Hill warned that a Trump White House return would be particularly dangerous because it would occur “on the back of a lie, a fiction” that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

“I was hoping that with the book, I might be able to reach out, because I’m not a partisan person, to people who care very much about the United States and about its democracy to really think about this long and hard,” she told Politico.

Hill said that her friends, many of them immigrants, are also disturbed by what’s happening. “They say, ‘This is not the America I came to. This is not the America we chose to come to,’” she recounted.  “Many people fled these kinds of authoritarian or autocratic regimes ... where you have kleptocratic cliques of cronies who are really trying to take charge of policy, and that’s what this [deep polarization] is about,” Hill warned.

What’s happening in the nation now is “not about ideology. It is a manipulation of particular social issues — abortion, immigration, all kinds of issues. This America is looking dangerously like Russia,” said Hill, an NSC expert on Russian and European affairs who testified at Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Hill grew up in England in a hardscrabble mining town and had to battle her way to the top of her profession in a world often controlled by men, she explains in her book. She was referred to by Trump’s onetime chief of staff Reince Priebus as “that Russian bitch.”

Trump once angrily called her “darlin’” because he assumed she was a secretary and was not taking notes fast enough, Hill revealed. Trump never considered her “part of his team” because she was a woman, she said.

Hill’s book has been characterized by reviewers as both personal and thoughtful about her career challenges as well as what she witnessed of Trump’s behavior.

When Trump met with foreign business leaders, he preened and boasted, insisting on being the center of attention, Hill said, according to a book excerpt published Friday by the Daily Beast.

“It was more about holding court than holding forth on issues of concern for American workers,” she wrote. “Sometimes the president took bizarre turns into rambling monologues completely lacking in substance.” He forced “captive audiences to indulge him as he went off on personal tangents.”

Discussions with “world leaders similarly became ‘me, me, me,’ sessions,” Hill revealed. “Trump’s favorite topics were golf or other sporting events and related analogies, and his personal or family’s business success.”

During prep sessions “when cabinet members, ambassadors, or NSC staff would try to offer perspectives on policy issues ... Trump would push back: ’I know this better than all of you .... I don’t need to learn anything from you,’” she wrote.

The full Daily Beast excerpt can be read here.

Check out the rest of the Politico interview here. 

Also on HuffPost

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.