“Essentially, he was promoting national security for his family – and a foreign policy to fit his own personal ambitions and world view,” Hill says. “It’s not We the People – it’s Me the People,” a phrase she invokes repeatedly in her new memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here, a title that draws on her experience growing up in an impoverished town in northern England, the daughter of a coal miner.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Hill called the ex-president “a counter-intelligence and national security risk because he was so vulnerable to manipulation based on the fragility of his ego.” She recalled Trump’s “nasty list,” a growing number of people who ticked him off in ways large and small. She was shocked that a man raised in such luxury, who’d never been denied anything, could be so insecure. “Anyone could induce him to do something by raising the specter of someone insulting him—or by praising him. His ideology was idolatry,” she said.

She dismisses the widely held belief that animated much of our politics for four years, that Vladimir Putin had some damning revelation on Trump that prompted the American president’s wildly excessive deference to his Russian president.