Fiona Hill, like other candidates for Best American Ever, is an immigrant, a Northumberland-born coal miner’s daughter, a Yankee by choice, not birth.

And it is with the zeal of the convert that she exemplifies what is best in us. Her north-of-England accent kept her out of Oxford, so she went further north, to St. Andrews, among the almost entirely unsnobbish Scots. Studying Russian there, she was told about a graduate program at Harvard, and got in. Her family had always been fascinated by the United States. When her father’s coal mine in County Durham had closed, he actually wanted to move to West Virginia to dig there. Instead it was his daughter who made it.

We are not a class-less society; far from it. But never have I been prouder of the plain fact that we at least try to level the workplace and academic playing fields than when hearing Hill in her House testimony on Thursday inform us that in the United Kingdom of her youth her stratospheric career could not have happened simply because of the impoverished circumstances of her birth.

Here, no one cared about her Geordie accent, that when she asks for a pint of beer it rhymes with “stint.” Here, she was director for the Center on the United States and Europe, served on the National Security Council, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the board of trustees of the Eurasia Foundation. She was an intelligence analyst under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and was appointed by Donald Trump as his deputy assistant and senior director for European and Russian affairs on his National Security Council staff.

It could be that her smarts, her love of country and her unswerving ethical compass will finally result in Trump’s downfall.

She told us what it was like being a normal American representing us overseas as Sondland, Mulvaney and Pompeo were “being involved in a domestic political errand” while she and her team of other normals “were being involved in national security, foreign policy — and those two things had just diverged.”

That errand she witnessed overtaking our own national security interests — which include protecting our ally Ukraine in its war with an invasive new Russian empire — was the president of the United States withholding congressionally provided foreign aid unless the Ukrainian president investigated the family of his potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden, as a personal “favor” to Trump.

In the end, after two and a half years working for Trump, Hill resigned this summer partly in disgust at the “fictional narrative” the president and his allies keep peddling about supposed Ukrainian interference in our 2016 election. She directly asked the Intelligence Committee Trump lapdogs to “please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

In thanks, her GOP interrogators tried and failed miserably to find ways to undercut her wisdom and her patriotism, and by testimony’s end what many women who watched are calling Hill’s unapologetic anger had carried the day. They were getting nowhere with a brilliantly impartial witness to damning facts. So they filled up their 45 minutes with inanities so she couldn’t talk. When she answered anyway, they tried to cut her off. A men’s habit about which she said: “when women show anger, it’s not fully appreciated — it’s often pushed onto emotional issues, perhaps, or deflected onto other people.”

Fiona Hill’s bruise-blue storm-front demeanor comes from seeing our national interests undermined by our own president. If it ends in Trump’s slinking away a bit early, her American anger will be remembered as such a blessing in the history of her chosen land.

Larry Wilson is on the editorial board of the Southern California News Group. lwilson@scng.com.