Olivia Troye, a former Department of Homeland Security official who served as an aide to Vice-President Mike Pence on the Coronavirus Task Force which Pence heads before departing in July, is endorsing Joe Biden in a video testimonial for Republican Voters Against Trump. Troye is the third former Trump Administration official from DHS to appear in a video produced by Republican Voters Against Trump. Former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor and former DHS Assistant Secretary Elizabeth Neumann have also broke with the Trump Administration and declared their support for Biden. However, Troye is the first defector associated with the Coronavirus Task Force.
In a profile of Troye for The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser writes:
In the video, Troye recounts when Trump, a noted germaphobe, met with the coronavirus task force, early on in the crisis, and told its members that perhaps the pandemic was a good thing because he would no longer have to shake hands with all the “disgusting people” at his rallies and other public events. During our interview, I asked Troye if she could remember other particularly memorable times when Trump spoke privately to the group. She recalled how Trump refused several times to consider urgent business that the task force presented to him, deciding “to talk about himself and a preferred news network and how upset he was with them, instead of focusing on the agenda at hand.” Fox News coverage, in other words, preoccupied the President more than saving American lives. I asked Troye if that shocked her. “No,” she said. She remembered what she thought at the time: “This is exactly what you would expect.”
Sadly, the surprise here is not that Trump acted so callously in the midst of a pandemic but that so many senior government officials know that this is happening and are doing nothing to stop it. Troye’s testimony, like that of so many others, is from inside the room—in this case, from inside the very room that is supposed to be dealing with the single biggest crisis currently afflicting the United States.
Predictably, Trump is claiming to never met her while Pence and his National Security Adviser Keith Kellogg have both described her as "disgruntled." Trump is, of course, a pathological liar while Pence and Kellogg prostrated themselves to Trump's knee so long ago that they cannot be given the benefit of the doubt. Especially so when one considers that Dr. Anthony Fauci states that Troye "was important to the team."
The question which remains is if anyone else on the White House Coronavirus Task Force will be prepared to back up Troye. Not that Troye's statements aren't damning enough. But one can only hope that a higher ranking official moved by Troye's courage might have a crisis of conscience and go on the record. But it is a faint hope. Even so it might not make a difference to Trump supporters even if Trump does consider them to be "disgusting people". But it could make a difference to Trump voters who thought he was a lesser evil than Hillary Clinton in 2016 while now seeing the evil of a Trump presidency.
Yes, I said evil. If a President was prepared to tell Bob Woodward back in April that COVID-19 was like the plague while insisting to the public that it was 99% totally harmless, I would characterize such behavior as evil. Only a evil man would congratulate himself after the deaths of nearly 200,000 Americans on his watch.
So is it really a stretch of the imagination that Trump would put his electoral fortunes ahead of the general welfare of the country? In which case, we should give Olivia Troye the benefit of the doubt.
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