Courage is contageous

When I spoke with Olivia Troye on Thursday afternoon, she sounded more than a little scared. She was about to go public with a scorching video, in which she would denounce President Donald Trump and his stewardship of the country during the coronavirus pandemic. Troye, who served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s adviser for homeland security until late July, has witnessed the Administration’s response to the crisis, as Pence’s top aide on the White House coronavirus task force. She had seen Trump rant in private about Fox News coverage as his public-health advisers desperately tried to get him to focus on a disease that has now killed some two hundred thousand Americans. She had decided that Trump was lying to the American public about the disease, and that “words matter, especially when you’re the President of the United States,” and that it was time to speak out. She was nervous and scared and worried for her family and her career. But she plunged ahead anyway.

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Troye joined the coronavirus task force when it was first established, in late January, before any Americans had died from COVID-19. Her experience on it, Troye told me, convinced her that Trump’s handling of the situation—the conscious spreading of disinformation, the disregard for the task force’s work—had made the crisis far worse for Americans.

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“For him, it was all about the election,” Troye told me. “He just can’t seem to care about anyone else besides himself.”

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She warned about the President’s push for a vaccine before the November election and said that she did not trust him to do the right thing for the country’s health and safety.

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She told me she believed that most other staffers on the coronavirus task force were genuinely motivated to help Americans weather the pandemic but that Trump blocked them from implementing the right policies. “Everything that you’re putting in place is derailed [...] by the person at the very top,” she said.

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On 9/11, [Troye] fled her office on foot, walking home past the smoldering fire of the Pentagon, a moment that convinced her, like many others in her generation, to pursue a career in national security. She went on to serve as a George W. Bush Administration appointee in the Pentagon. For the first year and a half of the Trump Administration, she worked at the Department of Homeland Security, as a career intelligence official, before being detailed to Pence’s staff.

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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 focussing on the agenda at hand.” Fox News coverage, in other words, preoccupied the President more than saving American lives.

  New Yorker

Pretty much the same thing Miles Taylor has said.

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.

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Every Presidency has its dissenters, people who leave and tell tales after they do so. But there has never been anything like the stories that have emerged from the Trump White House, from so many who worked with the President and observed him up close.

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In the end, this is what struck me most during my conversation with Troye: she is young, only forty-three years old, with a long career ahead of her, and she was willing to put it all on the line publicly, whereas people like [former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the former White House chief of staff John Kelly] were not. That contrast could not have been more stark as I read a [former director of National Intelligence Dan] Coats Op-Ed in the Times that published the same day as Troye’s video. Coats, clearly referring to Trump’s recent undermining of faith in the upcoming election, said that a national commission should be established by Congress to insure confidence in this fall’s voting. Coats never once referenced Trump by name, and he has never publicly come forward to share with Americans his misgivings about the President. Why not? He is a veteran U.S. senator and a former U.S. ambassador who closed out his career as the head of the massive U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. What does he have to risk?

Troye, with much more to lose—and with none of the stature of a former member of Congress or a former Marine general—had much more courage than all of them. She went ahead when they have not, knowing that she would be attacked. And, sure enough, when the video went online, the White House released a comment about her that was harsh and personal. Her direct supervisor in Pence’s office, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, told the Washington Post that Troye was a “disgruntled” former detailee from the Department of Homeland Security who was “no longer capable of keeping up with her day-to-day duties.” Later, when Pence himself was asked about Troye, he told reporters that she was just “one more disgruntled employee who’s left the White House [and] decided to play politics during an election year.”

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I asked [Troye] if she was bothered by the failure of senior officials who share her views to speak out as she had done. Troye was generous. “I know that I am not alone—and how hard it is,” she said. But, she added—and this is a point that cannot be repeated enough between now and November 3rd—this is not a time for silence. “I hope that this will encourage other voices who were obviously much more senior than I was to tell the truth about the situation here we’re in,” she said. “And how dangerous this is.”

If others come forward, it won't be powerful men, I can tell you that.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.