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Trump 'will push for a third term', British former White House official warns - as she compares president to Putin
2 April 2025, 18:02 | Updated: 2 April 2025, 21:02
Fiona Hill on having her White House security clearance revoked
A former top White House official who served under Donald Trump has told LBC "we can be pretty sure" he will push for a third term as president.
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Fiona Hill, who served in Mr Trump's National Security Council, told Tonight with Andrew Marr that the public should not take "as a joke" the president's comments that he would like to serve a third term.
Mr Trump, who was elected for his first term in 2016 and his second in 2024, floated the idea of running for a third term earlier this week.
Like Ms Hill, he also maintained he was not joking, and said there were “methods” – if not “plans” – to circumvent the constitutional limit designed to prevent dictatorships in the US.
Ms Hill said: "Irrespective of what the Constitution says, which it's a very flat, basically denial of an additional term, we can be pretty sure he's going to push.
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Former White House official Fiona Hill speaks to Andrew Marr
"It's also because he doesn't want to be a lame duck. He doesn't want to be written off. He doesn't want to have his power diminished in any way whatsoever by suggesting that he's not going to be here for the longer term."
She said there would be precedents for this kind of behaviour, such as Vladimir Putin and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"And that should also be pretty chilling from the perspective of looking at US democracy," she added.
Ms Hill, who left her official post to return to academia in 2019, only had her security clearance revoked in March this year, alongside Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.
After she left the White House, Ms Hill, a Russia expert, testified in Mr Trump's impeachment hearing later that year.
On having her security clearance revoked, Ms Hill told Andrew that it was a "performative" and "symbolic but still meaningful slap" from Trump.
"It shows that he doesn't like you and the people around him have been instructed to find ways to hurt you in some ways."
Ms Hill was speaking the week after it was revealed that a journalist was accidentally invited by White House officials to a top-secret military planning chat on the messaging app Signal - suggesting a major security breach.
She said that there would be "a lot of questions" about whether it was still safe for allies to share intelligence with the US after the breach - especially given that the president had also taken sensitive documents to Mar-a-Lago.
Ms Hill said she knows from personal experience that Trump "really doesn't put any store in intelligence".
She added: It's really all about for him the interactions with individuals and people at the top. And he's pretty loose with what he tells people.
"He thinks... this is all just sort of fair game to discuss quite openly. So I think it's a question for all allies of the United States to really kind of assess right now how they want to position themselves."
Ms Hill's comments come ahead of Trump's tariff announcement on Wednesday evening UK time, which is likely to have a major impact on the British economy.
Keir Starmer has said the UK is prepared for any eventuality, but Ms Hill urged the British government to be cautious.
"This is something that doesn't just affect Britain, it affects all of the UK's trading partners," she said.
"So I think that being very careful about how this is assessed, looking to see know how others are reacting among the UK's key trading partners, is going to be pretty critical here and certainly not making any precipitous moves until we see how this plays out."