President Donald Trump once derailed a meeting of the White House’s coronavirus task force to rant for 45 minutes about Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence has claimed.
Olivia Troye — a former member of the task force who earlier this week endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with a scathing denouncement of Trump’s handling of the pandemic — said Trump was focused on getting someone to set Carlson straight over his criticism of then-White House counselor Kellyanne Conway while pressing issues about the public health crisis were still to be discussed.
“I think the only thing that matters is what, at the end of the day, people are saying about him,” Troye said of the president in a video released Friday by the Republican Voters Against Trump group.
“While the rest of us are sitting in the room, I saw people looking down at the floor, looking down at the desk or the table in front of them or their shoes thinking, ‘We have actual items on this agenda that we really need to discuss and time matters right now but instead we’re going to go resolve your concern about whatever some news anchor said off the cuff that upset you,’” Troye said.
“That is who President Trump is. That’s what he cares about,” she added.
Check out the video here:
Troye, who left the White House last month, on Thursday told The Washington Post that Trump had a “flat-out disregard for human life” amid the pandemic that’s now killed almost 200,000 people nationwide because he was focused on the economy and his reelection.
In another video released by GOP anti-Trump group ― which has spotlighted Republicans fed up with the Trump administration, including several who worked for it ― Troye recalled Trump once saying in another meeting that the pandemic could be a good thing because it meant he wouldn’t have to shake hands with “disgusting people.”
Check out that video here:
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