September 18, 2020

By Walter Einenkel

Daily Kos

Former top aide to Vice President Mike Pence and onetime official on the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force Olivia Troye has released a new video slamming Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The testimony she gives is not surprising, but the details of how much of a monster Trump really is hit home. Saying that Trump and the White House knew the 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic was in America and deadly serious in February, Troye reiterates what has been generally reported: that Donald Trump purposefully downplayed not just the messaging around the pandemic but also the need for serious public health maneuvers to be taken by the government. He did this because it is a campaign year.

But probably the most damning part of the pro-Biden ad is Troye’s recollection of Trump looking for the silver lining in the pandemic, telling the task force that “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 remarks, “Those disgusting people are the same people he claims to care about.”

This is just one more in a series of anti-Trump campaign ads being released that feature former Trump administration officials, who paint the white supremacist in chief as the cruel and self-involved schmuck that we’ve all known him to be. The messengers in these ads are not great people. They have worked for and with an administration that has repeatedly brought us closer and closer to fascism while inflicting human rights violations on entire populations of people.  

However, these ads are poignant because the people in them were in intimate contact with Trump and his inner circle, day in and day out. Their perspective as first-person witnesses to his corruption, incompetence, and abdication of his duties as commander in chief are telling. All of them are Republicans, and all of them are willing to vote for Biden.

Posted with permission