Ex-Pence aide will vote for Biden due to Trump's 'flat out disregard for human life'

Olivia Troye claims president said Covid-19 was a ‘good thing’ if it meant he didn’t have to shake hands with ‘disgusting people’

A former adviser to Mike Pence and the White House coronavirus taskforce will vote for Joe Biden because of  Donald Trump’s “flat out disregard for human life” during the pandemic.

Olivia Troye, who left the Trump administration in August, told The Washington Post that the president’s main concern was the economy and reelection, and that she wouldn’t trust a Covid-19 vaccine that launches before the November vote.

Ms Troye said the president claimed that Covid-19 was a “good thing” because it meant he didn’t have to shake hands with “disgusting people”.  She said he was referring to his own supporters.

"Those disgusting people are the same people he claims to care about. These are the people who are still going to his rallies today, who have complete faith in who he is."

She joins several former officials, or what the White House calls “disgruntled” ex-employees, to flip on the president to detail the dysfunctional inner workings of his administration’s first term.

“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,” Ms Troye said in an interview with the Post.

While former national security advisor John Bolton and former defence secretary Jim Mattis have previously opened the book on their time inside Mr Trump’s presidency, Ms Troye is one of the first to focus on his handling of coronavirus.

She was a major, if behind-the-scenes, participant in the White House’s coronavirus taskforce, working closely with Mr Pence on the response, briefing the vice president, writing his comments, and setting meeting agendas, according to the Post.

“I would not tell anyone I care about to take a vaccine that launches prior to the election … 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,” she said.

She said the White House missed months to slow the virus because of the delay in advice from public health officials to recommend wearing masks.

“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 … It was detrimental that it became a politicised issue. It still lingers today.”

Ms Troye, who left the vice president’s office to work at the not-for-profit National Insurance Crime Bureau, was speaking as part of an anti-Trump Republican group called Repair 45, started by former Homeland Security Department chief of staff Miles Taylor.

In the campaign video, she says virus was unpredictable but by mid-February they knew it was a matter of when, not if, Covid would become epidemic in the United States.

“But when the president didn’t want to hear that because his biggest concern was that we were in an election year and how was this going to affect what he considered to be his record of success,” she said.

“It was shocking to see the president saying that the virus was a hoax, saying that everything’s ok when we know that it’s not. The truth is he doesn’t actually care about anyone else but himself.”

Mr Pence’s national security advisor, Keith Kellogg, told the Post in a statement that she was disgruntled her detail was cut short because she was “no longer capable of keeping up with her day-to-day duties” and showed a lack of moral courage by not expressing any concerns about the coronavirus response when she had the opportunity.

White House spokesman Judd Deere, meanwhile, said in his response to the article that Ms Troye’s “assertions have no basis in reality and are flat out inaccurate”.