There Is Nothing for You Here by Fiona Hill review – more than just a White House memoir | Biography books

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When Donald Trump heard that Fiona Hill was publishing a memoir, he uniquely tried to make a pre-emptive blow, dismissing his former adviser to Russia as “a deep tough state with a nice accent”. As Trump’s insults came out, it was enough of a backhanded compliment for one of Hill’s friends to have it printed on a T-shirt as a gift.

Much has happened since Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings in late 2019 in which Hill provided evidence, at least in one frontal attack on U.S. democracy by his supporters. But people still remember his accent. There’s something so calm and absurd in Hill County Durham’s flat vowels that the opposite of Trump’s threatening audacity. His voice, that of a coalminer from northern England describing the chaos and corruption inside the White House, immediately asked: “How did he get there?”

Hill’s book, There Is Nothing for You Here, is a long, thoughtful answer to that question. It takes on the story of industrial and political decay in three countries: the UK, the country of his birth; the US, the country of his choice; and Russia, the goal of his lifelong vocation.

The strong currents that drive the modern history of those three states carried him on his wonderful journey in life. The state -assisted euthanasia of the British coal industry in the early 80s drove him from his hometown of Bishop Auckland, where his family had been miners for generations.

The title of the book is a warning from his father, Alf, to come out while he still can. She first went down the pit at age 14, but by the time Fiona was growing up, the only job she could find was as a hospital porter, the bottom of the pile with no way out. The Hill family is the archetypal victim of the post-industrial decline that he will continue to study. “We’re living data points,” he realizes.

Following his father’s advice he made his way through education. He went to St Andrews University and then to the Soviet Union in time to observe its final years. The expertise he acquired brought him to the U.S. and Harvard as a Russian scholar with a growing reputation that eventually brought him to the White House.

Trump took his pre-publication shot at Hill because he naturally assumed that his book, like a shelf full of others of former staff, was about him. But for Hill, the former president is just a symptom of a deeper, chronic dysfunction. There’s a lot here about the madness of life in the Trump administration and Hill is capable of taking on the folly of King Donald’s court. She described the scramble to get her attention (she had no idea who she was and was sometimes mistaken for a secretary), the relentless bullying (her “colleagues” called her a “Russia bitch”), and the general fear the president will turn his back on them.

While other memoirs of the Trump era are mostly focused solely on the carnival, Hill’s coverage goes out to the wounded country that put him in place, and then even wider, across the Atlantic to Britain and then to all over Europe to Russia.

What they all have in common is rapid, catastrophic deindustrialization. In Russia, that happened with the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union. In the US and UK, this is done by the political leadership and their economist teachers.

“Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped insert the nail into the coffin of twentieth -century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket were nearly impossible to remove the lid,” Hill said. Those buried alive, in memorable metaphors, have lost their sense of community and self. Being a miner is more than just a job for Alf Hill and his contemporaries, it’s an identity.

That’s where political populism enters, offering to fill the hole with entertaining illusions. Hill pointed out that 61% of voters in Bishop Auckland chose Brexit even if it meant cutting funds into the EU structure that were crucial to its revitalization attempts. This is also why American rust belt voters have convinced themselves that Trump understands them.

It’s a review that others have laid out before, but what’s particularly compelling here is that it’s intertwined with a unique life story of an English working woman who ended up sitting honestly, and coolly observing, the pretense. “Mighty ones” in our age.

Where Hill is most provocative is in his warnings that having centuries of democratic experience does not necessarily protect us from Russia’s fate. “Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future”, he says, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t fix and heal our political polarization. “What if the next Trump is“ less personally insecure and more capable “? And what if the next insurrectionary mob to invade the U.S. Capitol was better prepared, Hill asks in this fascinating book. The answer?” Maybe they’ll just handle it. “

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century is published by Mariner (£ 28.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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