But you knew that
The New York Times interviewed some of Trump’s national security advisers and they were unsparing in their criticism:
Former President Donald Trump threw a fit and launched into a profanity-laced rant at a 2019 meeting when the topic of Ukraine came up, according to a former aide, falsely accusing the country of trying to defeat him in the 2016 US election.
Speaking to The New York Times Magazine, Charles Kupperman, then serving as deputy national security adviser, accused his former boss of being incapable of understanding global politics and the importance of Ukraine. For him, Kupperman said, it was all personal.
That became clear in a May 23, 2019, meeting. According to Kupperman, who left the Trump administration five months later, Trump “just let loose” when the topic of Ukraine came up.
“They’re [expletive] corrupt. They [expletive] tried to screw me,'” Trump said, Kupperman told The Times.
Later that year, Trump was impeached by the House after withholding some $400 million in security aide for Ukraine that had been approved by Congress, telling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksyy in a September phone call that he first wanted a “favor”: that he publicly announce an investigation into his rival’s son, Hunter Biden. He also asked for an investigation into the unsubstantiated claim it was Ukraine — not Russia — that interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign.
“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike… The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump told Zelenskyy, referencing a false claim — pushed by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Russian intelligence — that Kyiv had sought to aid the presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In his interview with the Times, Kupperman said it was clear this — and manufacturing dirt on the Biden family — was the extent of his interest in Ukraine.
“If one were to ask him to define ‘balance of power,’ he wouldn’t know what that concept was,” Kupperman said. “He’d have no idea about the history of Ukraine and why it’s in the front pages today. He wouldn’t know that Stalin starved that country. Those are the contextual points one has to take into account in the making of foreign policy. But he wasn’t capable of it, because he had no understanding of history: how these countries and their leadership evolved, what makes these countries tick.”
Fiona Hill also had some choice words:
“In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors,” said Hill, per the outlet.
Hill compared Trump to the presidents before him, noting how meetings with George W. Bush in 2008 differed from her experience during the two years she served in the Trump administration, per The Times.
She told the outlet that Bush, unlike Trump, actually read his briefing materials. She added that she was allowed to give unpopular opinions to Bush without being punished or frozen out and that Bush asked respectful questions.
In comparison, Hill said it was a tall order to try to steer policy under Trump.
“It was extraordinarily difficult. Certainly, that was the case for those of us who were serving in the administration with the hopes of pushing back against the Russians, to make sure that their intervention in 2016 didn’t happen again. And along the way, some people kind of lost their sense of self,” she said, per the outlet.
Hill also told The Times that Trump “was using Ukraine as a plaything for his own purposes” — particularly when he sent his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on a “domestic political errand” and pressured Ukraine to investigate then-former Vice President Joe Biden.
Trump responded:
“Fiona Hill is a Radical Left RINO, but the word RINO is too good. She doesn’t know the first thing she’s talking about. If she didn’t have the accent she would be nothing. During the Impeachment Hoax #1, she had no credibility, obviously, because we won unanimously. Never listened to her, I hardly knew her at all. She knew nothing about me, I knew nothing about her, and I liked it that way,” Trump said, according to his chief spokeswoman, Liz Harrington.
Actually he didn’t win unanimously. All Democrats voted to convict as did one Republican. But whatever…
You have to love this from the NY Times Magazine article:
The relationship between the Trump campaign, and then the Trump administration, and Russia would have implications not just for the United States but, eventually, for Ukraine as well. The litany of Trump-Russia intersections remains remarkable: Citizen Trump’s business pursuits in Moscow, which continued throughout his candidacy. Candidate Trump’s abiding affinity for Putin. The incident in which the Trump campaign’s national security director, J.D. Gordon, watered down language in the 2016 Republican Party platform pledging to provide Ukraine with “lethal defense weapons” to combat Russian interference — and did so the same week Gordon dined with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, at an event. Trump’s longtime political consigliere Roger Stone’s reaching out to WikiLeaks through an intermediary and requesting “the pending emails,” an apparent reference to the Clinton campaign emails pirated by Russia, which the site had started to post. Trump’s chiming in: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The meeting in the Seychelles islands between Erik Prince (the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and a Trump-campaign supporter whose sister Betsy DeVos would become Trump’s secretary of education) and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund in an effort to facilitate a back-channel dialogue between the two countries before Trump’s inauguration. The former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s consistent lying to federal investigators about his own secretive dealings with the Russian political consultant and intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik, with whom he shared Trump campaign polling. Trump’s two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in the summer of 2018, unattended by staff. Trump’s public declaration, at a joint news conference in Helsinki, that he was more inclined to believe Putin than the U.S. intelligence team when it came to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The dissemination by Trump and his allies in 2019 of the Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine that meddled in the 2016 election, in support of the Clinton campaign. Trump’s pardoning of Manafort and Stone in December 2020. And most recently, on March 29, Trump’s saying yet again that Putin “should release” dirt on a political opponent — this time President Biden, who, Trump asserted without evidence, had received, along with his son Hunter Biden, $3.5 million from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor.
Totally fine! Let’s get him back in office ASAP!