The article has a link to a Twitter thread that starts with an excerpt from the video.

(This feels meta: HN links to a Tampa newspaper, which links to a Twitter thread, which embeds a clip from a video released by The Hill, which contains a clip from Fox News, where one half of the audio comes from a phone line to Donald Trump. Pointers to pointers to pointers. Oh, and now you get me, talking about it.)

The framing is interesting. (I have always found it hard to pin down The Hill.)

First, what Trump said: Mostly, he tried to take credit for cancelling Nord Stream 2. This is a little weird, because it didn't seem especially cancelled. Related to this, he told an unverifiable but plausible anecdote about giving Angela Merkel a white flag, to say that she was "surrendering" to Russia: I say "plausible" because he was pushing Germany (and Europe in general) to increase its defense spending (by threatening not to defend NATO, which you could say emboldened Putin, but you could say that about other things too, like Obama's "red line". "Mistakes were made."). And at the end of the Trump clip, a little unnecessarily, they leave in one sentence from him to the effect that "this would have never happened if I'd been re-elected", which of course he expresses in terms of a supposed "steal".

Could the Hill have cut the clip just before that last sentence? Yes. They would have lost none of their main message. They would have lost something to react parenthetically to, though.

Did they include that one sentence simply because it was adjacent and it gave them some shock value? Or was this their way of smuggling the message to their (not-so-Republican) audience? ("We are ostensibly laughing at Trump, but at least this gets you to listen to him"?) I don't know.

Their reaction is one of implicit mockery. They also imply that Trump typically would also insert some talking point about his supposed healthcare plan (which never happened). Which again they laugh at, because everybody knows there was nothing there.

They also refer to Trump's supposed "defense" of Putin: From context, it sounds like Trump said that Putin's use of the word "peacekeepers" was clever. But there is a weird moment where the host repeats the word "peacekeepers" several times, almost unnecessarily. A paranoiac could say he was trying to reinforce the message.

So what is The Hill's slant? With Rising they lean towards a kind of moderate populism that I have always associated with Russian propaganda. Though that has only ever half- made sense to me: Sure, Russia would want to get support away from the more interventionist centrists ("first choice Trump, second choice Bernie, last choice Hillary"), but you'd think they'd also want to push division, and The Hill's moderate populism is actually not so inflammatory (it does not shove wedges into cracks between identities, like, honestly, CNN/BBC/(CIA?) do. Or did until Biden got them to moderate themselves, a little?)

And The Hill has tended to give time to writers like Matt Taibbi who emphasize that they think "Russiagate" is fake. (Maybe they're right though?)

So then how do we put it all together?

Maybe I should just take The Hill at face value: They're trying to do an "inside baseball" thing, and this really is the compromise political position they've decided they believe in (presumably because it looks like a way forward that seems "good" to them while also protecting their interests).

Anyway, I guess the lesson for The Hill is that, if you're using sarcasm to deal with Trump's claims, you're being too subtle. And if I can write a post this long wondering what their angle is, then they're being too subtle.

Which might be necessary and true, but would still be a little sad: "We can't have interesting things because the other people are too stupid."