Fiona Hill on Putin’s long game, Trump’s transactional foreign policy, and the danger of mistaking size and bluster for real power. Plus: Trump’s grocery-price fiction and V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers.

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum examines one of the most consequential deceptions of the Trump presidency: the insistence that grocery prices are falling when Americans know from lived experience that they are not. David explains how tariffs and trade policy are deliberately driving food costs higher, why Trump keeps lying about it, and how breaking this promise strikes at the core of the fragile trust between voters and government.

Then David is joined by Fiona Hill, a former adviser to three U.S. presidents and a key witness in Trump’s first impeachment, to analyze how Vladimir Putin sees the world and why Trump remains so drawn to strongman power. Frum and Hill discuss Putin’s long game in Ukraine, Trump’s archaic and backward worldview, and how Trump’s presidency has been a gift to Putin while steadily eroding American credibility abroad.

Finally, David closes the episode with a discussion of Among the Believers, by V. S. Naipaul, reflecting on the Iranian Revolution and why authoritarian regimes repeatedly fail at modernity.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Fiona Hill, an adviser to three American presidents on Russia and Eurasia generally, and of course a central figure in exposing President [Donald] Trump’s wrongdoing that led to the 2019 first impeachment of President Trump.

My book this week will be a 1981 travelogue by the great writer V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers, which took him to, among other countries, Iran in the immediate aftershock of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Before I get to the dialogue and the book, I wanna open with some preliminary thoughts about a domestic subject. And that is this extraordinary moment where Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins informed a TV interviewer that her department had run thousands of simulations, and good news, it was possible to feed an American person for less than $3 if that person ate a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing. She didn’t have enough respect either for her audience or for the people she was talking about to remember what that fourth thing was that would make up this kind of snack plate. And this has attracted a lot of question marks: What if you want a second corn tortilla? And by the way, with chicken selling even at Walmart for between 25 and 30 cents an ounce, how big a piece of chicken is that piece of chicken going to be for under $3?

But aside from the “let them eat cake” aspect of this, one of the things that is really striking has been the refusal of the Trump administration even to acknowledge that there is a food-affordability problem in the United States. President Trump has responded to the increases in the price of food, the general price increase under his presidency, by simply lying about it. I’ve got a little summary here—I don’t pretend this is an exhaustive summary. Here he is on October 21: “Grocery prices are way down.” Here he is on October 16:. “Groceries are down.” Here he is on October 14: “Now, as you know, groceries are down.” October 10: “We’ve gotten prices way down for groceries.” At the United Nations [on] September 23: “Under my leadership … grocery prices are down.” I’m sure there are many other instances. On January 13, President Trump addressed the Detroit Economic Club, and there, he spoke from a script, so there was a little bit more effort to make the words not a complete lie. And his quote on January 13 was: “Grocery prices are starting to go rapidly down.” (Laughs.)

Now, grocery prices are up, up, up. Data released in the week that I record this program by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the cost of food at home rose 2.4 percent overall in the 12 months of 2025 and 0.7 percent in December alone, the fastest single-month increase since October of 2022. And the rise in food prices stands out because many other prices are ceasing to go up so fast. Gasoline, rent, other similar prices, the worst of the inflation for them seems to have at least taken a little pause in December, but grocery prices continue to grow. And many individual food items are up astonishingly high: the price of beef, up 16.4 percent; the price of coffee, almost 20 percent; price of lettuce, other fresh produce, the price of frozen fish, again, up. The one exception to all of this is the one price that the Trump people love to talk about, and that is the price of eggs. Those are down. But across the board, grocery prices are way up.

And this is not, as it was under [President Joe] Biden, just a product of a general price inflation affecting the whole world. Many of the price increases have been driven very deliberately upward by particular policies. Price of a can of beans is up because the price of the can is up, and the price of the can is up because the metals in the can have been hit by tariffs by President Trump. You put a tax on aluminum and steel, you make cans more expensive, and if you make a can more expensive, the thing in the can becomes more expensive, whether it’s beans, whether it’s soda. Trump threatened to put a 92 percent tariff on Italian pasta. He backed away from that threat a little bit in January, but pasta is still tariffed, and the Canadian wheat that goes into American-made pasta, that’s also tariffed.

So this was done deliberately and on purpose—and without a lot of regard for the fate of the people on the other end. This could be dealt with by a different kind of president by some argument that it’s worth it: Yes, you’re all going to have to pay more for food, but that is on the way to my vision of self-sufficiency through tariffs. We’ll seal off the United States economy in the world, and even though you’ll all pay more and maybe be a little poorer, at least you’ll have less trade with foreigners. But the Trump people are just systematically incapable of dealing with trade-offs and telling the truth. And they’re especially dishonest about the distributional effect. When you put food prices up, not everybody pays equally. The richer you are, the smaller proportion of your income you spend on food and the less you notice the price at the grocery. But the people who are in the middle or in the lower part of the income distribution, they feel it most, and they are many of the people who trusted Donald Trump to help them because through campaign 2024, he promised that that would be his first priority—not just that he would stop, right, prices from going up, but that he would make them go down.

Now, Trump lies about a lot of things, and a lot of the things that he lies about are things that it’s difficult for people to check, or maybe they just seem too abstract to check: Our economy is the hottest in the world. How do you prove that right or wrong? But the people who decide elections, they know what everything in the grocery basket costs, and they know that the president is lying to them again and again and again. And that has an impact on their faith [in] him personally and directly—it has an effect on the political calculus. But it has an effect generally on the way politics works.

The Americans who turned to Donald Trump were those most distrustful of the political system, most inclined to believe that the political system is indifferent to them, deceitful to them, and they put special and unique trust in this one person, whom they regarded, falsely, but whom they regarded, trustingly, as a great business leader, to tell them the truth and to deliver them relief. When he breaks his word to them, of course, he breaks the special political bond that he once had, and you can see that in all the polls that show him down, down, down, and especially down on economic issues. But it’s an attack on their faith in the general political system because if this one unique figure that they were willing to trust, if he too is deceptive, then what is there? It raises the question, again, of how we go on from here and how we restore the relationship of trust between the American people, their government, and the president who leads the government and symbolizes the government. If he’s not a person [you] can trust, how can anything be trusted?

It’s a haunting and difficult question, one probably that won’t be resolved so fast, but a question that is going to dominate our politics for the three remaining years of the Trump presidency and through this election year of 2026, when people will once again get a chance to say, We resent these prices. We resent the deliberate policy to make the prices go up. We resent being lied to. We want something different. We want a change.

And now my dialogue with Fiona Hill.

[Music]

Frum: Fiona Hill has served three presidents as a deep expert on Russian affairs and Eurasia broadly. Born in the United Kingdom, educated at Harvard and St. Andrews University in Scotland, she is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and chancellor of Durham University in Great Britain. In 2021, she published a memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here, about her upbringing in England’s former coal country.

Fiona Hill is best known for her courageous integrity during and honest testimony about President Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine for his personal political advantage in his first presidential term. In this moment of global crisis, I am one of many who turns to Fiona Hill for insight and guidance. Fiona, thank you so much for joining me today.

Fiona Hill: Thanks so much, David. It’s really great to be with you.

Frum: So let’s start by looking at the world from the other side of the board, from [Russian president] Vladimir Putin’s point of view. You have spent a lot of time thinking about how he thinks, what he’s thinking about, the way he’s different and surprising from an American point of view. How does the world look to him? Ukraine, a pending crisis in NATO, but he’s taken some blows in Iran and Venezuela—how does the world map look from his point of view?

Hill: Well, David, it’s good that you pointed out those negative aspects of some of the recent changes for Putin from the start, thinking about those blows, as you put it, I think very aptly, in Iran and Venezuela, two countries which have very close relationships with Putin and Russia, which I’m sure we’ll get to in the course of our discussion. But if you put some of those downsides, again, on the shelf for the moment, until we get back to them, if you took it at just face value, the world would look pretty propitious from Putin’s point of view. Because you mentioned in your introduction Trump’s efforts to extort, as you put it, President [Volodymyr] Zelensky of Ukraine in the run-up to that first impeachment trial, and Putin’s all in the business of extortion, basically using all kinds of manipulation or force, bullying, you name it, to get what he wants. And he wants a world in which might makes right, in which it’s a battle for, basically, spheres of influence by strongmen, and on the surface, that seems to be where we are.

If we look back to the first Trump administration in 2016 and then, of course, the whole period with Biden, things look much more ambiguous from Putin’s point of view. He wasn’t really quite sure what the trajectory was going to be. He wasn’t sure what the direction of travel was going to be. But he was certainly hoping that he would be able to take advantage of circumstances and to push Russia’s advantage.

You may remember that he also tried to bully Biden in 2021—it seems so far away now that none of us can really remember it—when he basically put the United States on notice that if Russia doesn’t get what it wants in terms of the United States pulling out of Europe, pulling back from Ukraine, taking NATO back to the studs, back to the borders, which it was in before its expansionary phase in the late 1990s, then Putin was gonna do something extreme, which, of course, turned out to be the full-on invasion of Ukraine in the February of 2022.

And so Putin has been pushing for advantage that whole period. And so from his point of view, if you look at it, it now looks like we are in a world where sphere of influences and strongmen and transactional relationships are shaping the environment.

Frum: As you and I speak, we have troops from NATO countries—including, of course, Denmark, but some of its Scandinavian partners, France, the U.K.—on their way to Greenland. How big a win is that for Putin?

Hill: (Laughs.) It’s enormous. And the posited reasoning for the United States of wanting to acquire Greenland—and again, this does actually go back, again, to the first Trump administration, 2019—but the posited reasoning is really acute pressure from Russia and China. And we’ve also had President Xi Jinping of China saying, We’re not interested in Greenland, not on us, and Putin also having never actually made any kind of claims against Greenland. So this is really something that is a fairly absurd development from everybody’s point of view. But for Putin, obviously, this is potentially a bonanza.

But this is where kind of a flip side of uncertainty might come into this because, as you’re saying, who are the troops? Perhaps not in the large-enough numbers—actually, if I was the Europeans, I’d be sending even more in. And what we’re seeing here is Europeans having to stake out their interests in the name of their security, but it’s in reaction to the United States, not just in reaction to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and that brings, I would say, a bit more uncertainty for Putin just along the lines of the blows that he’s already had in Iran and Venezuela.

Frum: Well, let’s look at the Ukraine map from his point of view. The war, as a military matter, has gone catastrophically badly for him. As I am told, at least the post–February ’22 conflict has now lasted longer than the Soviet involvement in World War II—they started late, of course. And the toll in life and money is overwhelming. But he is maintaining his position on the ground, and he’s got an American administration that seems to conceptualize a peace treaty as finding out what Putin wants and giving it to him at the expense of the Ukrainians.

Hill: That’s absolutely right. And this is where Trump’s return to the White House has been a real boon for Vladimir Putin, because he is now operating in a world which is, for Putin, a very easy one to navigate in the sense of you’ve got global leaders—and he only really counts as global leaders Xi and Trump—who have the same sort of mindset of wanting to go and return to that 19th-century or even 18th-century, certainly early-20th-century, view of transactional relationships among the big powers, with everything defined, really, by politics at the top, not this kind of mass politics that came in much later. So Putin’s very comfortable in that environment.

But as you’ve pointed out, Ukraine was a catastrophic blunder. He did this full-on invasion in Ukraine not expecting it to be all the things that you’ve described. This wasn’t intended to be the largest military action in Europe since World War II. It certainly wasn’t intended to last longer than the Soviet Union was battling Nazi Germany, which that’s the threshold, as you point out, we just passed this month. That is just remarkable. It was supposed to be a “special military operation.” In many respects, it was supposed to be something along the lines of what the Trump administration just pulled off in Venezuela, a decapitation, thinking that they would remove Zelensky, and they’d probably get, in fact, what the United States government is angling to get in Venezuela, a pliable alternative leader, who might have actually come out of the same system, and it would be business as usual for them, not basically new forms of business for Ukraine. So it’s been an absolute disaster.

But the point is that Putin is something of what one might call a survivalist and a prepper. He’s basically been building up resources. He’s been thinking long and hard about what it takes for Russia to be more resilient, even though it is quite brittle in terms of its political system and in terms of what we see unfolding there in Ukraine—you can’t keep this up forever. But Putin has marshaled resources and all the capabilities of Russia to the point— heavily militarized the economy, heavily militarized the whole system—he has this vertical of power that enables him to do all kinds of things that other leaders cannot, even Trump. You can’t really sue Vladimir Putin as you can, currently, still sue the United States government. But his bet is that, because of these changes in international circumstances, especially because of the incumbent in the White House, that he will be able to last everyone else out. He will have the ability to, basically, press this to a final conclusion that, despite all the losses, all the incredibly high costs—and he is ruthless, and he’s prepared to pay that price—everybody else will fold. That’s his bet.

Frum: I think of [Lord] Farquaad in Shrek: Some of you may die, but that is a price that I am willing to pay.

Hill: (Laughs.) Yes, in fact, that’s a great analogy. And all kind—

Frum: Also a very small leader. (Laughs.)

Hill: (Laughs.) Exactly. Probably about the size of Vladimir Putin, in fact, and always on a horse.

Frum: (Laughs.) How bad is the news for him from Venezuela and from Iran?

Hill: Well, it depends, right? Everything always depends. And this is what Putin is very good at: He’s got strategic patience. Everybody talks about now—it’s become a complete cliché, but it certainly wasn’t 20-odd years ago, when people were trying to understand Vladimir Putin. Remember, he’s actually quite predictable now. We’ve got 25 years of data points from a man that we knew very little about, that Masha Gessen called “the man without a face.” We now know his face. (Laughs.) We know about his family. We know all kinds of different things about him that we did not know before. And what we also know is that he bides his time.

If you think about Yevgeny Prigozhin, who, a couple of years ago, we thought, Oh my God, is it all gonna teeter? He’s getting this backlash from the war in Ukraine. He’s got an insurgency. There’s a man marching on Moscow. Could this be it? Could this be a coup? And there wasn’t a lot of support for Putin. But of course, that fizzled out. And it’s many months before Yevgeny Prigozhin meets his demise by literally falling from the greatest window in the sky, as people have a tendency to do in Russia—meeting mysterious and unfortunate deaths. And that’s the end of all of that.

So what Putin is waiting for right now is to see if, in many respects, those escapades in both Iran and Venezuela, which look extraordinarily harmful from all the vested interest that they have, in particular, in Venezuela in terms of oil, sending in security forces to prop up [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro. Iran’s support for a whole matter and manner of different issues for Russia, from actually helping them counteract Sunni Muslim insurgents in the country, ’cause, of course, Iran is Shia; to helping produce that first batch of drones that Russia has used against Ukraine, to pretty good effect as well, the Shahed drones; to being that other great kind of power in the region. Their hope, I think, now is that everything else goes kind of haywire, that it doesn’t follow those trajectories that everyone might anticipate—Iran, the theocracy, doesn’t fall, because that would bring all kinds of uncertainty and actually not a good look for Putin—and that, as we’re already seeing in the case of Venezuela, Maduro is just being replaced by his deputy. So for Putin, that’s actually not that bad, so he will wait to see how this plays out. It’s like a judo tournament for him: You wait ’til everybody else is off-balance. You just kind of wait, and you figure out what the opponent is gonna be; you don’t just leap in there. Again, that’s his expertise in judo. You just wait until you can leverage everybody else’s strength against them.

Frum: And he’s got, once again, the help of his friend, the president of the United States, who in both countries, Venezuela and Iran, really seems to have betrayed any ideal of democracy. In Venezuela, he seems to have made it very clear that he wants the next thug in line. This is not regime change; it’s dictator rotation. In Iran, the president promised the Iranian people that help was on the way. As you and I speak, that promise seems to have been utterly empty and not honored, and people have died in the thousands and maybe the tens of thousands believing the word of the United States, a mistake. It’s such a shame and a sorrow even to think that the word of an American president could be so worthless, but there it is. So Putin is going to get maybe some second-bests, thanks to Donald Trump.

Hill: And that’s good enough for him because you can rack up a lot of second-bests; then you win a tournament. The whole point for Putin is staying in the game and kind of waiting out his opponents and seeing if he can outfox them over time. Again, he’s pretty predictable in this. And he knows that Donald Trump’s word is empty—let’s just be frank—because the one thing that Putin is extraordinarily good at is figuring people out: figuring out their vulnerabilities, figuring out their weaknesses. He’s less good at figuring out people’s strengths because he doesn’t believe that anybody’s altruistic. He doesn’t really believe that anybody would do something for goals that are not venal or not personalized, for example, so Trump fits his category of the person that he’s used to dealing with perfectly. There are people like the pope, the current pope, who I think Trump would have a more difficult time of dealing with—Putin would, rather. Did I say Trump? I might have said Trump. (Laughs.) But anyway, Trump might also have a difficult—

Frum: It’s a natural mistake.

Hill: —with the current pope as well. But Putin—anybody who actually stands for something that’s different and actually looks like they actually mean it and is not trying to achieve something that Putin can actually get his hands on and try to manipulate it, that is more difficult for him. But right now Trump is playing to form. It’s the form that Putin expects. And I’m pretty sure that Putin, perhaps misplaced, in any case feels very confident that he can manage everything that’s happening. But I say that could be misplaced, but it’s not for the reasons of Trump suddenly getting religion, to use this kind of metaphor and pull it out a bit further.

Frum: One last question from Putin’s side of the playing board. You mentioned a couple of times that Putin thinks in terms of power. But when he thinks in terms of power, he thinks in terms of military power, espionage power, maybe natural-resource power; he doesn’t seem to have a very sophisticated grasp of the way economies work. And so one of the things that has happened since February of ’22 is that Russia’s slide toward becoming a Chinese economic colony does seem to have accelerated, and if he emerges from this Ukraine war, even with a seeming military success—with a change in the borders, or a friendlier regime in Ukraine, or withdrawal of American support from Ukraine or Poland or the Baltics—he still has the problem that it’s China who pays his bills. And—

Hill: I think that’s spot on.

Frum: —does he think about things like that?

Hill: I’m sure he does, because he certainly had plenty of warnings in the past. But I think, at this point—and again, it seems that this is the trajectory that he’s on—he’s not really thinking of a period when peace breaks out. He’s become a wartime president, and I think he feels that he can keep a wartime economy ticking along for quite some time and maybe put off, then, the kinds of problems that he will inevitably face.

We’re seeing all kinds of problems in the U.S. economy, and the U.S. economy is immensely resilient because of the structure of it, the nature of it. And the Russian economy is resilient in some similar but very different ways, more related to autarky and just the vastness of its natural resources. But that, of course, makes it very difficult to marshal them and to move into those value-added chains that we expect in a more sophisticated economy. And Russia had been moving in that direction up until the full-on invasion of Ukraine, but it was quite difficult because its economic model was running out of steam. And the war has injected a new head of steam into it.

Now, the one thing that Putin clearly doesn’t care about is human capital. And that is also very interesting ’cause you wouldn’t, in that regard—and this is why I think President Trump just doesn’t get Putin at all: He cannot understand why you would slaughter all of these people that you actually need to make your economy work. Even with a miraculous shift to AI, you’re still gonna need people. And that’s what Putin has done: He has squandered the future of his human capital. A lot of people are working, admittedly, offshore, particularly in the Gulf and other places, and still contributing to the Russian economy. But you look down the line and that idea of economic recovery, that idea of innovation that’s not just related to defense and to innovation on the battlefield, that’s one of the areas that Putin has likely squandered. And of course, he’s completely eroded trust. And although other countries look to Russia right now and still want to factor them in as a great power, they no longer think of Russia as a superpower, and they absolutely, certainly do not think of Russia as a technical, innovative, economic superpower. And as you said, it’s much [more] likely to end up being some kind of appendage of China at the end of all of this, even more so than it already is.

Frum: Yeah, when you mentioned Putin’s belief in “might makes right,” one of the most striking legacies of his rule is going to be the definitive end of Russia as a mighty state. It may overpower Ukraine; it can certainly scare Estonia. But if you think—and you used to do this kind of work—if you project the world of 2036, 10 years from now, we’ll have two superpowers: the United States and China. We’ll have a number of countries that are economically very important, but not militarily strong: India; the European Union, if you think of that as a power player; possibly Japan; possibly Britain. Where’s Russia? Maybe there with Japan and Britain as countries of some economic power because of their natural resources, some military power, but nothing like an India, let alone a China or the United States, in the way that Putin imagined he might be when he started the Ukraine war.

Hill: Yeah, and actually, Russia was on, before this—and, in fact, before seizing Crimea, which I think was the moment where Putin shifted the trajectory of his presidency—Russia was up there in the larger economic powers. There was a whole goal of being not just in the G7 or the G8, but being one of the top five or six global economic powers, and at one point, that looked like that might be possible. But as you’re saying, that’s not likely to be where Russia is, although shifts in its trade patterns still, the commodities, that might bring something. But I think that the world is gonna be a very complex place if I look out to 2036.

I think we’re squandering ourselves, the United States, some of those fundamental bases of power, which you’ve been pointing out in many of your podcasts and other things that you’ve been writing and with your colleagues in The Atlantic. I think that we’re gonna look more at much more regional bases of power. But of course, the United States is still gonna have the ability to shape things in the world, and China is increasingly gonna have more ability, particularly in terms of technology, research, education, all kinds of innovation, to shape the way that everybody else responds. But I wouldn’t rule out India, Brazil, even South Africa, which the United States seems to be in a fight in at the moment, and European countries, perhaps not in the EU configuration, but there’s just been such a jolt to Europe that we shouldn’t rule out some constellation of European countries, maybe in Northern Europe—Scandinavians, the Balts, the Poles, and others—actually really stepping up there in response to what’s happening, especially what’s happening in Greenland, and becoming a much more military place. Finland is significant as a military. We’ve still got Turkey as a major military power. So things could change quite a lot in this next decade.

Frum: Well, the most dramatic slap in the face, and I can’t quite do this math in the head while I’m talking live, but as I sort of pull up what I recall of the figures and just do a quick calculation, we’re not very far away from Poland overtaking Russia in the size of its economy.

Hill: Yes, and Poland is spending about 5 percent now of its GDP on its—

Frum: Yeah, this puts Russia back to where it was in the 1600s, when Poland was the stronger, at least economically. Let me ask you—

Hill: Well, and remember the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was actually Europe’s biggest country and most significant for that period up until when you’re talking about.

Frum: Let me ask you now to change the lens back to Washington. There has always been this strange, mysterious, difficult-to-explain, but unmistakable-to-observe affinity that Trump has had for Putin. And that does seem to continue, that the big Trump idea for ending the war in Ukraine is to cut off the flow of information, reduce the flow of supplies to Ukraine, and put pressure on them to yield to Russia’s terms. Do you have any sense of why, not just Trump, but [special envoy] Steve Witkoff and people around him, think that that’s such a good idea?

Hill: It’s how they think about power and the manifestation of power. They don’t think about “we the people,” as in you, I, and, what is it, 340 million people who live in the United States or the 140 million and declining in Russia. They don’t think anybody has agency apart from big guys and—usually men, of course. And if there are no checks and balances, and you have unfettered power, then that is kind of the epitome of might and might makes right. As Trump himself has said over and over again, most recently in The New York Times lengthy interview, he sees no constraint apart from his own. And that’s how they see Putin, and indeed, Putin has whittled away all of the checks and balances in his system. He seems to be at this pinnacle of this vertical of power and to be unchecked, unconstrained in every way imaginable, and so for them, he’s the guy to deal with. Steve Witkoff and Trump, as real estate moguls, they’d go to the guy who was in charge and then get their guys on lower levels to deal with things from there.

And it’s really the kind of power that Trump has. I remember in Trump 1.0, the former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, who was a good friend of Trump’s—he was a jeweler from New York and had known him for many, many, years. And he was talking about [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán. And in fact, I think it was an interview in The Atlantic, of all things, in which he said, This is what Trump wants. It’s what Donald Trump wants. He wants to be that kind of leader. And in many respects, that means that’s what Putin’s got on him, because he knows that Trump needs his respect, his validation. And I saw that over and over again in Trump 1.0, where Trump would want to call Putin ’cause Putin had said something nice about him on international television or he’d want to talk directly to him, and of course, those discussions are mediated for Trump—and for Witkoff as well. They don’t speak Russian, so it’s always through a translator. They hear what’s being presented to them. They don’t get the sense of the man and how he’s making fun of them and what he really thinks. So this is always problematic. They see what they want to see, which is their own validation in Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin sees that, and he just gives them what they want.

Frum: Is it all about that kind of petty vanity?

Hill: Of course. That’s at the root of things. I’m sorry; it’s just from years of observation of this. Putin knows exactly how to do it. I and many others who study kind of Russia, we’ve all been subjected to this.

There’s a famous episode of Putin helping a Russian politician who there’s no reason why he would help him, and I was related this story by the politician himself, who was done a pretty significant favor by Putin. And this person has actually told this story publicly, but when we asked him why, and he said Putin said to him, when he’d asked the same question, Well, you never know who you might turn out to be or when I might need something from you.

Putin plays to vanities, he plays to vulnerabilities, he plays into times of need because he never knows when he might need something. And they act in the same way—Witkoff, Trump, they’re all kind of birds of a similar feather. But unfortunately, they’re not quite as good at this as Vladimir Putin, because he’s had years of training and honing these skills as a KGB agent, and 25 years of being president of Russia in a pretty vicious political environment.

Frum: It’s like the opening scene of The Godfather: One day, and that day may never come, I will ask a service of you in return.

Hill: Exactly right, exactly right. And the thing is, they all think in similar frames because of where they operated: real estate. It couldn’t be any more similar to the kinds of environments in which Putin operates in. But the thing is, Putin thinks of himself as the head of a state of a state with millennia of history. He talks of himself in that regard. He’s got an idea about being cloaked in the mantle of the power of the state and the church. He sees himself as the heir to all kinds of emperors and even empresses, with Catherine the Great. Trump thinks of just himself. And if he’s thinking of American heroes, it’s just as he defines them, not as they might define him.

Frum: Well, one of the things, if you say it’s about vanity, that is disquieting about all this—there are, of course, all these theories, and I never pretend to know if any of them are true or if none of them are true. There are theories that there is compromise. There are theories that there is bribery. There are theories that Trump is looking forward to some future payoff. And I must say, as contemptible as all of those things would be, they’re somehow less pathetic than he’s looking for compliments. But when you see Trump in the Oval Office with someone else’s Nobel Prize in his greedy little hands, with a smile on his face as if the stolen cup of apple juice tastes just as good as the cup of apple juice that was intended for you, it occurs to you, Yeah, maybe it’s just as dumb and pathetic and cringey and embarrassing as that: that he just loves the compliments.

Hill: It is cringey, and I felt like that many, many times when I was in his presence with world leaders. I would cringe because he was also making himself incredibly obvious. And that’s what Putin is: He’s the master of, obviously, domineering and dominating people. He’s the master of seeing the obvious, but he’s also the master of digging a bit deeper.

Now, in terms of compromising material, we’ve all got all kinds of information on Trump and the enrichment of him and his family. Meme coins—it’s all in plain sight. What more do we need to know about? We’ve got the [Jeffrey] Epstein files and all the scandals about all of that at the moment. Putin doesn’t need any of that. I remember once saying to one of the Russian ambassadors, ’cause I was supposed to be, obviously, giving them the kind of equivalent of démarche about interference in the United States elections, and he ran off a whole host of different things that different people, Americans, had done and said, Can you blame us for that, Miss Hill? And I thought, Got me. Of course not, because we do plenty of things ourselves that actually lay ourselves open to this kind of manipulation, all the mistakes that we make that turn out to be fateful, and we can’t blame Russia for everything here.

Frum: It’s not a question of blaming them—

Hill: No—

Frum: —it’s a question of punishing them.

Hill: —but we’re blaming them for finding information and for using that, because, again, we’re producing plenty of these scandalous episodes and problems ourselves, and they just know how to use them. So I’m just saying that I’ve never been really convinced that Putin had something that was so off the charts in terms of its radioactivity that it could bring Trump down, because so many other things have failed to do so.

Frum: Why can’t Trump see that Putin is less powerful than he was three years ago?

Hill: I think it’s because of his frame from the Cold War in the 1980s. I think it’s still that idea. He’s said it many times in relationship to Ukraine, that Russia is just a big power. He thinks of it just as Putin does.

Frum: But it’s not. That’s the thing I find baffling. The Soviet Union certainly was, and in the first decade of Putin’s reign, Russia looked that way, whether it was or not, but it doesn’t look that way now.

Hill: Yes, but it does to Trump because he doesn’t really listen to the assessments of you, me, or anyone else on this score. For him, it’s the size of a country. So we’re getting back to what we were talking about before: Why does he want Greenland? Because it’s 2 percent bigger, 10,000 square miles bigger, than the Louisiana Purchase. So it would be the biggest real-estate deal in history. Who’s got the biggest real estate in the world? It’s Vladimir Putin. He’s been sort of described as the richest man in the world by everybody from Elon Musk, who clearly is, not Vladimir Putin—he’s not going to cash out and kind of run around the world behaving like a tech mogul. But everybody thinks of this still in terms of just its size and the weight of it on the world stage.

Frum: And the animosity to Ukraine and Zelensky, is that personal? Is that a grudge about 2019 and Zelensky not doing what Trump wanted for the election? Is there something more going on there that—

Hill: It’s all of those things.

Frum: It seems to be a real antipathy. And in [Vice President J. D.] Vance’s case, I get that it’s ideology. Vance wants to bring far-right powers to rule in Europe, and Zelensky’s success would validate the liberal parties. But Trump, it just seems very—what is it?

Hill: It’s those things that you’ve laid out, completely, but I think there’s also another edge to it that gets back to what we’ve just talked about. I think he’s envious, in some respects, about Zelensky, though he would never, ever say that, because Zelensky’s got all the accolades, rightly so, of being a real wartime president, of being somebody who didn’t back down in the face of attempts to push him out. He’s also a small guy, and Trump thinks it a small country, though, in territorial size, Ukraine isn’t a small country. And he’s somebody who has been given the wartime mantle of a Winston Churchill. And Trump hates that. It’s just like [Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina] Machado getting the Nobel [Peace] Prize. And Zelensky just hasn’t backed down, and Zelensky’s had the temerity to take him on, on a number of occasions, to push back. He hates that.

Frum: I know talking in the way I’m about to talk would get me thrown out of a National Security Council meeting for moralism and so on. But is there an issue just that Trump is wicked and cowardly, and he hates people who are good and brave?

Hill: Yeah, look, that’s a cartoon version of it, but obviously, one would kind of say, yes, in some cases, that is the case, but not in all cases, because there are some times when he does express admiration for something that somebody’s done, but it doesn’t necessarily directly affect him. I think that’s kind of the problem, is when somebody takes something that he thinks is his: a Nobel Peace Prize, the attention of the world as a wartime president or somebody who’s at the statue of Winston Churchill, kind of literally—and then he was soured on Churchill for a while when everyone kept comparing Zelensky to Churchill. So I think it comes into that frame in which his own personal validation is at stake. But I think that he can admire other people ’cause I’ve seen that. He isn’t a cartoon character. He’s complicated and complex, even as a—

Frum: Who have you seen him admire? Who have you seen him admire who deserves admiration?

Hill: I was sort of thinking that it’s often people who are not necessarily kind of world figures, somebody who has actually even done something unspeakably good for people, somebody who’s been really brave. He’s often kind of put himself out there for some of the hostages, not just to get accolades for bringing them back. There have been times when he’s done something that won’t necessarily give him popular acclaim all the time, and look, there are a couple of issues that I think he has to be given some credit for. He’s not the kind of person who wants to preside over mass slaughter, even though it might look like it at times when we see what’s happening currently in the country. But he is appalled by what the Iranians are doing. He’s appalled by what Putin’s doing. He was appalled by what [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad did, and he wanted to do something kind of about it. He’s not somebody who wants to have the charnel houses filled with mountains of skulls; that’s not him.

The other thing is that he genuinely wants to see an end to the risk of nuclear war, nuclear Armageddon, just as Biden did—they’re the same age group. He’s been pretty consistent on this. He really did want to finish off the efforts that were started in the 1980s. And this is what’s ironic at the moment because, of course, we’re in a bit of a pickle because the New START treaty has now lapsed. But he really did want to have those big arms-control, arms-negotiation talks, not just with Russia, as the former Soviet Union, but also with China, with Iran, with North Korea. He does actually want to make the world a safer place from a nuclear perspective. And I feel that’s the tragedy, because he perhaps could have done something to that if he’d been more disciplined and more focused and less worried about whether he was going to get all kinds of accolades for it. That was what he was trying to do in Helsinki, back before that disastrous press conference and his first proper meeting with Putin. I think it’s a genuine sentiment on his part.

Frum: So that does de-cartoonify things. So you can give him that.

Hill: Absolutely. Look, and you still get lots of people saying, Look, he’s warm. He’s charismatic. I’ve seen flashes of that. But that’s not sufficient, in my view, to normalize a person (Laughs.) who is doing an enormous amount of damage. And the other thing is that, just like Putin, he’s a pattern breaker, but he’s even more of a pattern breaker than Putin, which actually means he does, obviously, see all of the problems that we’re facing. He’s identified them all, I think, extremely well. He’s broken the pattern. But he’s just not somebody who, beyond real estate, is actually really building something. And because his tendency is towards dividing everyone and conquering them—again, like Putin—and he’s not bringing people together to do things, which perhaps he could have done. So I think it’s almost Shakespearean for me, as though you have the hero, or the person who’s the hero in their own telling of the tale, but their own flaws prevent them from doing the things that they actually think that they want to do and for actually addressing the issues that they have correctly identified as being the key ones.

Frum: Yeah. So it’s part of his self-image—he would like to be a peacemaker if it just didn’t require so much reading.

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