Loren Hill/Reuters
- Fiona Hill thinks Trump will run again in 2024 because he "still wants to be king and regain his throne."
- Hill, Trump's former top adviser on Russia, said he "really liked kings and queens."
- Out with a new memoir, Hill also described Trump as having "autocrat envy."
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Fiona Hill, former President Donald Trump's top advisor on Russia, said she thinks Trump will run for president again in 2024 because "he wanted to be king."
"He still wants to be king and regain his throne," Hill told the Daily Beast in an interview published Tuesday.
Hill is opening up with more of her frank assessments of Trump with the release of her new memoir "There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century," which traces her journey from a working-class upbringing in northern England to the White House.
Trump was "a counter-intelligence and national security risk because he was so vulnerable to manipulation based in the fragility of his ego," Hill told the Daily Beast.
"Anyone could induce him to do something by raising the specter of someone insulting him – or praising him. His ideology was idolatry," she added.
Hill, a top expert on Russian and Eastern European affairs, joined the White House from the Brookings Institution in 2017 and later became a key witness in Trump's first impeachment trial.
In 2019, Hill gained a national profile for her stark and detailed testimony that led the House to impeach the former president on charges of abusing his office and obstructing Congress in connection with his efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help Trump hurt his political rivals.
In the interview, Hill described Trump as having "autocrat envy" about leaders like Hungary's Viktor Orban, China's Xi Jinping, and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "He also really liked kings and queens," she said.
Another former top Trump official, ex-White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, similarly predicted that Trump will run again in 2024. Grisham wrote a memoir of her own about her time in the Trump White House, "I'll Take Your Questions Now," which was also published on Tuesday.
"He's on his revenge tour for people who dared to vote for impeachment," Grisham told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Monday. "I want to just warn people that once he takes office, if he were to win, he doesn't have to worry about reelection anymore. He will be about revenge."