**DISCLAIMER: This article was first published in April of 2022**
The bombshell CNN exposure of Donald Trump Jr.’s damning text messages to his father’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — sent just days after the November 2020 election, before the race had even been called, in which the then-president’s son was already floating ideas and suggestions for overthrowing the election his father was about to lose — was bad enough for the already scandal-ridden former president. In fact, one former federal prosecutor theorized that Jr.’s messages serve as proof that Donald Trump and his innermost circle were planning to overthrow the election all along.
But that legal expert isn’t the only one with that theory. It seems one former inside Trump official saw those precise signs very early on.
Fiona Hill is a foreign policy expert who served as an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and was appointed by Donald Trump as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on his National Security Council staff. She also served as a key witness in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial in the US House of Representatives, over his attempted extortion of Ukraine.
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According to a bombshell report from the New York Times, Hill spoke out and revealed that she found herself truly alarmed very early on by Trump’s clear preference for authoritarian rule and even overheard him blatantly trashing democracy in conversations with other world leaders on more than one occasion.
“He would constantly tell world leaders that he deserved a redo of his first two years,” Hill stated. “He’d say that his first two years had been taken away from him because of the ‘Russia hoax,’ and he’d say that he wanted more than two terms.”
The Times reporter attempted to suggest that Trump’s rants were actually just meant as jokes, but Hill was quick to shut down that notion completely.
“He clearly meant it,” she said.
Hill wasn’t alone in this assessment of the now-former president either. David Cornstein, a longtime Trump friend and jeweler that Donald appointed as his ambassador to Hungary, was known to state that Trump regularly expressed his clear admiration for Hungary’s right-wing authoritarian leader.
“Ambassador Cornstein openly talked about the fact that Trump wanted the same arrangement as Viktor Orban,” Hill went on to explain, “where he could push the margins and stay in power without any checks and balances.”
The foreign policy expert went on to explain that after Trump managed to “win” his first impeachment when the Senate ultimately voted to acquit, she knew then and there that Donald Trump was going to do everything in his power to steal the 2020 presidential election.
“In real time, I was putting things together,” Hill stated. “The domestic political errands, the way Trump had privatized foreign policy for his own purposes. It was this narrow goal: his desire to stay in power, irrespective of what other people wanted.”
Hill was deep into working on her memoir on the morning of January 6th, when her friend allegedly called her and told her to turn on the TV. She was met with live footage of Donald Trump’s supporters violently storming the nation’s Capitol building while the whole of Congress and the country’s vice president were inside. It was then that it all because crystal clear to her.
“I saw the thread,” Hill said. “The thread connecting the Zelensky phone call to Jan. 6, and I remembered how, in 2020, Putin had changed Russia’s Constitution to allow him to stay in power longer. This was Trump pulling a Putin.”
Read the full report from the Times here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
