KEY WHITE HOUSE CORONA AIDE LEAVES THE WHITE HOUSE

 

…Olivia Troye, in the background left, attends a coronavirus briefing at  the White House with the President and Vice President Pence

 

“Incorrect information of the virus have made our ongoing response a failure,”

 

President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic showed a “flat-out disregard for human life” because his “main concern was the economy and his re-election.”  This is according to a senior adviser on the White House coronavirus task force who left last week.

Olivia Troye, who worked as homeland security, counter-terrorism and coronavirus adviser to Vice President Pence for two years.  She said that the administration’s response cost lives and that she will vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden this fall because of her experience in the Trump White House.

“The president’s rhetoric and his own attacks against people in his administration trying to do the work, as well as the promulgation of false narratives and incorrect information of the virus have made this ongoing response a failure,” she said in an interview.

Troye is the first Trump administration official who worked extensively on the coronavirus response to forcefully speak out against Trump and his handling of the pandemic.  Olivia  joins a growing number of former officials, including former national security adviser John Bolton and former defense secretary Jim Mattis.  These individuals have also detailed  their worries about what happened during their time in the administration, while declaring that Trump is unfit to be president.

The amount of criticism Trump has faced from former aides is unprecedented in the modern presidency, and it could pose a political risk to his reelection campaign as some of the aides who have spoken out are pressuring other former colleagues to join them.

The White House dismissed Troye as a disgruntled former employee, minimized her role on the task force and disputed her characterization that the pandemic response has not gone well.

“Ms. Troye is a former career Department of Homeland Security staff member, who is disgruntled that her detail was cut short because she was no longer capable of keeping up with her day-to-day duties.” This is a statement by the retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg,   Kellogg is Pence’s national security adviser, and he said in a statement. “Ms. Troye directly reported to me, and never once during her detail did she ever express any concern regarding the Administration’s response to the Coronavirus to anyone in her chain of command. By not expressing her concerns, she demonstrated an incredible lack of moral courage.”

Actually, Ms. Troye was concerned because of the president’s statement, such as 34 times that Trump said the “coronavirus would go away like a miracle.”   From her position as a coronavirus adviser to the Vice President, she was aware how incorrect that statement has been.

 

                        …Ms. Olivia Troye, Covid-19 aide to the Vice President

Since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, President Trump has repeatedly said that the virus will disappear.  Deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere said Troye’s “assertions have no basis in reality and are flat-out inaccurate” and that “the truth is President Trump always put the well-being of the American people first,” citing the president’s efforts to boost the production of medical equipment, his early recommendations on social distancing and the plan to quickly develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

But Troye had an inside view of the White House’s pandemic response, which polls show is hurting the president with voters, and her review of the effort is scathing.  She said in an interview that she would be skeptical of any vaccine produced ahead of the election because of worries that its release was due to political pressure.

“I would not tell anyone I care about to take a vaccine that launches prior to the election,” she said. “I would listen to the experts and the unity in pharma. And I would wait to make sure that this vaccine is safe and not a prop tied to an election.”

Though Troye played a behind-the-scenes role during her time in the White House, she was a major participant in the task force’s work, attending and helping to organize “every single meeting” it held from February until July, she said. She worked closely with Pence on the administration’s response, including establishing an agenda for each meeting, preparing the vice president and arranging briefings for him, writing and editing his comments, and dealing with the vice president’s political aides.

She was often pictured sitting against the back wall of the White House Situation Room near Pence in photos posted to social media. Her assistant would send the seating chart to officials across the administration, who in turn would consult with her about the workings of the group and Pence.  She was involved with all the decisions made regarding the coronavirus in the White House.

She described herself as a lifelong Republican who always voted for the party’s nominee before 2016. Troye said she did not vote for Trump, because she disliked his rhetoric. She declined to say whom she voted for in 2016..  “But I got past it and accepted that he was our president,” Troye, 43, said of the election result.

Troye said that she worked in the administration because she hoped Trump would morph into a stronger leader after a divisive campaign and that she had respect for other Trump officials, such as Pence.

“I still have a lot of respect for the vice president,” she said. “I worked very loyally for him to do everything I could for him. I don’t want this to become a speaking-out-against-him thing.”

Asked about Troye’s comments later in the day, Pence just said he was very proud of the administration’s performance.

“I haven’t read her comments in any detail. But it reads to me like one more disgruntled employee that has decided to play politics during election year,” Pence said.

Trump dismissed her charges Thursday evening. “I have no idea who she is,” he told reporters. “I never met her, to the best of my knowledge. Maybe she was in a room. I have no idea who she is. She doesn’t know me.”

The novel coronavirus has infected more than 6.6 million Americans and has now killed over 200,000, a toll Troye said has been exacerbated by what she called Trump and his administration’s mishandling of the pandemic and by the conflicting messages he and his top aides have disseminated to Americans on masks, social distancing and other public health precautions.

Trump, she said, usually was not focused on the virus but would often “blindside” the task force and administration officials with public comments, such as his support for the drug hydroxychloroquine, his Twitter attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the agency’s guidance on the reopening of schools, his skeptical comments about masks and his public musings about “herd immunity.” Many of his comments were the opposite of what had been discussed in the Situation Room, where task force meetings were often held, and were at odds with scientific recommendations or the administration’s own data,” Troye said.

The administration, she said, missed months to slow the spread of the virus because the president and other key administration officials refused to embrace masks, even as members of the task force and health officials “repeatedly begged” Trump to do so. Trump allies note that many of the health officials first advised against masks before advising that they be used.

“The mask issue was a critical one. If we would have gotten ahead on that and stressed the importance of it, we could have slowed the spread significantly,” Troye said. “It was detrimental that it became a politicized issue. It still lingers today.”

Senior aides to Pence held a contemptuous view of the administration’s scientists and tried to project a far too rosy outlook about the virus with cherry-picked data.  “Key public health agencies including the CDC were marginalized throughout her tenure,” Troye said. “Advisers were afraid to express positions contrary to the president’s views because they feared a public denunciation or “that they would be cut out,” she said.

“At some point, every single person on the task force has been thrown under the bus in one way or another,” Troye said. “Instead of being focused on the task at hand, people were constantly wondering what was going to drop next or when you’re going to get reprimanded or cut out of a process for speaking out.”

Troye said the White House did not quickly resolve problems with coronavirus testing in the early months as the virus spread, though she concedes those hitches were not personally Trump’s fault.

Trump rarely attended task force meetings and was briefed only on top-level discussions by Pence or the government’s public health officials. When Trump attended one meeting, Troye said, he spoke for 45 minutes about how poorly he was being treated by certain personalities on Fox News.

“He spent more time about who was going to call Fox and yell at them to set them straight than he did on the virus,” she said.

Troye said Trump was constantly looking to reopen states and schools, even when others feared that doing so would be unsafe.  He would regularly disregard what his advisers suggested.

“There were a lot of closed door conversations I have had with a lot of senior people across the administration where they agree with me wholeheartedly,” she said of her assessment of Trump.

Perhaps there will be more White House individuals that defect from the Trump Team….we hope.

Copyright G. Ater 2020