Trump compared to ‘Queen of Hearts’ as he asked for a list of enemies to receive ‘payback’

Donald Trump asked for a "nasty list" of world leaders who said anything negative at any time about the former president, according to a new book.

Fiona Hill, Mr Trump’s former Russia adviser, says her old boss asked the US State Department to track the comments of foreign officials so he wouldn’t have to meet with his harshest critics in person.

He also sought “payback” for anyone who made his “nasty list” for real or perceived insults, Ms Hill wrote in There Is Nothing for You Here, excerpts of which were reported by Newsweek ahead of its commercial release on 5 October.

“At times like this I felt like Alice in Wonderland watching the Queen of Hearts constantly calling ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ whenever someone displeased her,” Ms Hill wrote in the book.

“And the president was forever wanting people ‘taken out.’”

Working on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, Ms Hill said she was reprimanded for failing at the “impossible task” of scouring the pronouncements of world leaders for any harsh comments in “the past or present”.

She points to the example of Mr Trump’s meeting with the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras in 2017. Fox News reporter John Roberts asked Mr Tsipras if he stood by comments a year earlier that Mr Trump was “evil”.

While Mr Tsipras responded diplomatically, Mr Trump replied: “I wish I knew that before my speech”.

Ms Hill claims she was yelled at by a deputy White House press secretary who was caught off guard by the unexpected criticism.

“After the Rose Garden episode, all US embassies and the respective country offices at the State Department were directed to keep tabs on anything ‘bad’ a foreign official said about Trump,” Ms Hill wrote. “We had to compile this material before a visit as part of the briefing package.”

Ms Hill was a featured character in another memoir released on Tuesday by former White House communications director, Stephanie Grisham.

Ms Hill thought that Russian President Vladimir Putin brought attractive translators to meetings with Mr Trump to “distract” the president.

“As the meeting began, Fiona Hill leaned over and asked me if I had noticed Putin’s translator, who was a very attractive brunette woman with long hair, a pretty face, and a wonderful figure,” Ms Grisham wrote.

“She proceeded to tell me that she suspected the woman had been selected by Putin specifically to distract our president.”

Ms Hill left the National Security Council in July 2019 before testifying as a witness in Mr Trump’s first impeachment trial over his call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Ms Grisham wrote in her book I’ll Take Your Questions Now that she didn’t see any “smoking gun” in that call because Mr Trump regularly said “insane things” to foreign leaders.

“I certainly didn’t see any smoking gun in the transcript that Trump had committed an illegal act,” she said in the book, according to Insider.

“But also, as the last chapter revealed, the president frequently said insane things to foreign leaders. Sometimes they were just silly or offensive, sometimes they were offhand remarks that would inadvertently upend the carefully crafted policies of our diplomatic and national security professionals, sometimes they were sheer bluster.”

In multiple statements, Mr Trump said Ms Grisham’s “untrue” claims were the result of a disgruntled employee who didn’t “have what it takes” after a break-up, in an apparent reference to her split with another White House official, Max Miller.

“She became very angry and bitter after her break up and as time went on she was seldom relied upon, or even thought about. She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself,” Mr Trump said.

“Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”