“It was shocking to see the president saying that the virus was a hoax,” said Olivia Troye, Pence’s former top aide on the White House Coronavirus Task Force
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images One of the more novel developments in the 2020 election has been the outpouring of Republicans and former White House officials disavowing the president or announcing their intention to vote for his adversary — a dynamic that was almost unheard of prior to Trump’s abrasive time in office.
“It was shocking to see the president saying that the virus was a hoax, saying that everything’s OK when we know that’s not,” Troye said, in an ad released by the group Republican Voters Against Trump. In the spot, Pence’s former aide recalled a task force meeting in which the president said that the coronavirus could be a good thing. “I don’t like shaking hands with people,” she recalled the germophobic leader saying.
Though the White House dismissed her account, claiming she was never in the room with the president, Troye added in an interview with the Washington Post that she helped organize “every single meeting” of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from February until July, and that she prepped and arranged briefings for Pence and wrote and edited his comments. As the Post notes, Troye “was often pictured sitting against the back wall of the Situation Room near Pence in photos posted to social media.
Other administration figures have declared Trump unfit to be president, including former national security adviser John Bolton and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, though Troye is the first ex-official to condemn Trump who has put a significant amount of effort into the coronavirus response.
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