Troye also told the Post that the president and his advisers regularly pressed to “move on” from the coronavirus even as cases surged and to turn the focus to the economy or the campaign. That’s entirely unsurprising given that Trump regularly takes to Twitter to praise the stock market as though it’s the most important thing happening right now, and in late January reportedly told advisers he didn’t want the administration to “do or say anything that would further spook the markets,” like, y‘know, adequately informing the public of the severity of the virus. According to Troye, top political advisers wanted to shut down the task force at the end of April, i.e. “in the middle of a pandemic.”
In a video released by a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, Troye says at some points during her time working on the COVID-19 response, she would look at herself in the mirror and say, “Are you really making a difference? Does it matter, because no matter how hard you work and what you do the president is going to do something that is detrimental to keeping Americans safe.” Which, in normal, pre–Trump times, might be a completely crazy thing to realize about the president of the United States but in 2020 is simply what much of the country has come to expect. Also crazy, but in no way surprising, given who we’re talking about: “[Trump] made a statement once that was very striking and I never forgot it because it pretty much defined who he was,” Troye says in the video. “When we were in a task force meeting, he said, ‘Maybe this COVID thing is a good thing. I don’t like shaking hands with people. I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people’.” As Troye tries to remind Trump’s supporters, “Those ‘disgusting people’ are the same people he claims to care about. These are the people still going to his rallies today who have complete faith in who he is. If the president had taken this virus seriously, or if he had actually made an effort to tell how serious it was, he would have slowed the virus spread, he would have saved lives.”
Troye is obviously just one of a number of former staffers who have disavowed Trump, along with former national security adviser John Bolton, who wrote an entire book about Trump’s unfitness to be president, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. And according to Troye, there are scores of other people who agree that the former real estate developer shouldn’t be allowed within 1,000 feet of the Oval Office who haven’t come forward because “the president has done a very effective job of creating a culture of fear.” (According to the Post’s sources, the group includes former White House chief of staff John Kelly, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and former National Economic Council chairman Gary Cohn. The former aides did not respond to the Post’s request for comment or refused to comment publicly.)