Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official

Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council staffer who served with President Donald Trump during his first term, tells Foreign Affairs that her one-time boss is utterly clueless when he has high-stakes meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

During a lengthy interview on Foreign Affairs' official podcast, Hill recalled Trump talking with Putin one time and being absolutely enthralled with the respect he believed that he was receiving from his Russian counterpart.

"The first time I was in one of the phone calls, I was listening very carefully to the Russian, because the interpreters don't always capture everything, they don't capture the nuances, particularly when it's the Russian interpreter," she said. "And Trump said, 'What a great conversation!' and I thought, 'Not really!' There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said, he chooses his words very carefully."

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She noted that this put Trump at a natural disadvantage when the two men talked.

"Many times when Putin and Trump were interacting, Putin's actually making fun of him!" she said. "It's just completely lost in the translation. I can give you lots of episodes of this, always trying to goad him and urge him on to something, because he's always trying to see how he'll react and the translation smooths over all that and the context is absolutely missing. And he doesn't do a readout afterwards!"

She went on to say that Trump's approach to dealing with Putin was "amateur hour" because he wasn't getting the deep meaning of Putin's statements beyond surface-level talking points.