The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 4, 2024, episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: Trump has continued to push the vile claim that federal officials are withholding disaster aid from Republican areas devastated by Hurricane Helene. GOP governors have contradicted this, and it has backfired, focusing media attention on Trump’s own record of disaster relief as president, which really did feature the ugly politicization he’s now accusing others of. For instance, Politico just reported that President Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after wildfires in 2018 due to the state’s democratic lean, according to two former Trump officials. Today, we’re talking about this with one of those officials, Olivia Troye, who was a senior Homeland Security official in the Trump administration and has since been a leading critic of the former president. Thanks so much for coming on with us, Olivia. Olivia Troye: Thanks for having me, Greg.Sargent: OK, let’s start here. The other day after Trump started pushing that lie that disaster relief is being denied to Republicans, you did a tweet that got some attention. It said this, “As a Homeland Security Advisor in the Trump White House, I witnessed firsthand how Donald Trump politicized disaster relief, leaving devastated Americans waiting for help. Leaders across the country & government were calling my office, desperate for action as Trump failed them in moments of crisis.” Can you expand on that for us? Troye: I have a lot of memories of working in the Trump White House where there are numerous situations where the government apparatus that does the whole disaster relief declaration process would come to a halt because the disaster declaration that needed to be signed by the president was sitting on Donald Trump’s desk. It was frustrating, as you can imagine, because we as national security officials serve for the greater good of the country. Our job is to help Americans, especially someone like me, who’s in the Homeland Security role working and advising the vice president. Our jobs are to work in response to a crisis as fast as possible and manage this. There were numerous instances where I had the head of government agencies calling me saying, Can you maybe get the vice president to weigh in on this because it’s still sitting on his desk and he hasn’t approved it yet.Sargent: You were working for the vice president at the time. Can you characterize your official position? Troye: Sure. I was Mike Pence’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor. In that role, I covered any crisis, global breaking news event that was related to whether it was global terrorism. On the Homeland space, I covered anything that was mass shootings, disaster relief like natural disasters like flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes. Anything that was a crisis domestically here that was related to the security and safety of Americans fall under me.Sargent: All right. Just to be clear, what you just told us is that you had leaders who were trying to deal with disasters, whether in federal agencies or at the level of states or whatever, call you and try to get you to move stuff along that was being held up by the president of the United States, Donald Trump. They would try to get action by coming to you and working through the vice president. Is that what you’re telling us?Troye: Yeah. There were numerous times when it was the secretary of DHS or the head of FEMA or even internally in the National Security Council process with the senior director we worked very closely on this effort. At times when they felt like it was stalled because Donald Trump was sitting on it or somebody had gotten to him, someone in OMB, one of whom was disagreeing with whatever was happening, depending on what state it was, they would come to me and say, We cannot get this moved forward, the people in this state are hurting right now, what can you do to help us? I can think of a time when even Mike Pence was flying out. I believe he was flying to California and he called me. They called me from Air Force Two and said, Where is the disaster declaration? We still haven’t seen it. And I said, Well, sir, it’s sitting on the president’s desk, I can follow up on it. And he said, Please do that. I remember walking over to the West Wing and sitting outside the Oval Office saying the vice president would like to know what the status is on the disaster declaration, he would really like to get this moved along, we’ve been sitting on it for three days. Sargent: Which disaster was this?Troye: I am trying to think. I believe it was wildfire related. Definitely California was an ongoing contentious issue when it came to the president, but I say this because it matters to be nonpolitical when you’re dealing with the safety and security and the well-being of Americans who are in need, right? This carried on into 2020 when we had the global pandemic, the Covid pandemic, that was so devastating. Again, this partisan politics of red states versus blue states and how you’re going to do the response to it or send supplies came into play again and there it was. I had seen it from wildfires. I’d seen it from how we’re going to respond to hurricanes depending on who it was, whether it was Puerto Rico, and what happened in the aftermath of that. And now it’s Covid and I’m seeing it again. It’s looking at, Oh well, it’s New York, it’s Cuomo, we don’t really care, let’s make it harder for them. I remember hearing a call with Vice President Pence who was like... We’re on with a governor who is out west in one of the first states that was hit with Covid that we knew of, and he was like, We’re not going to play partisan politics on this. This is really serious. We’re going to work closely together with you. Again, that’s Mike Pence’s perspective, right? We were trying to figure out how to navigate the situation in the Oval Office that we were up against.Sargent: Politico just had a good scoop on all this too, reporting that in 2018, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid to California after the 2018 wildfires because the state had a lot of Democratic voters. Worse, to change Trump’s mind, according to this report, senior officials showed him data confirming that Orange County, California, where there was wildfire damage, had lots of Republicans in it. That got Trump to finally move, apparently. You were one of the officials who confirmed this report by Politico. Can you confirm the story for us?Troye: Yes. I remember that situation where we basically put together a briefing to inform the president because he wasn’t approving this mandated relief aid, this funding. They were federal management assistance grants—these are mandated funds. These are already approved funds that need to get to the people who are in need of them. And he wouldn’t budge on it. It was this readout put together to present to him and let him know and inform him actually that the people that were in need were in Orange County and that they were his supporters. We compared it to the state of Iowa at the time and said there’s more voters in support of you than in the entire state of Iowa. It’s the way it was put. This is a very real thing. I’m telling you this because these are the conversations that would happen on senior staff, national security officers, working on these issues where our job was just to help, again, the American people in a nonpartisan way. This is the kind of thing that would get Donald Trump to move because for him, everything is through the political lens of anger and vengeance and retribution against the people that don’t stand with him. I say this now, when I look at Donald Trump and disasters in places in red states, red-leaning states, like Florida, I think about his demeanor and his behavior. This is important because while you may have a Republican governor in your state, if you have a falling out with Donald Trump like we’re seeing with Governor Kemp—he constantly attacks Governor Kemp of Georgia—he’s going to turn that on you. He could potentially use disaster relief as one of the tools, because at that moment, he holds the levers when he’s in power, right? That’s the one thing that he can hold over this person’s head. Politics should never play a role when it comes to disaster relief and what is happening here in the apparatus of government. It just shouldn’t even be part of the conversation when it comes to disaster relief in this thing.Sargent: Right. He clearly sees government funds and government resources as a tool to extort people. He did that in Ukraine, of course. I want to ask, though, on this decision involving disaster aid to California after the 2018 wildfires. This is a decision that would have been run through the senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. You were on the National Security Council at that time, right? That’s how you know all this? Troye: That is correct. Because as an advisor to the vice president, I’m actually a part of the National Security Council apparatus. I’m in all these meetings. I was in all the civitas as whenever there is a crisis, or planning for a crisis, any of these discussions, we are sitting in the coordination meetings with the entire U.S. government apparatus that plays a role in these things. These are all the things that we work on together as a team. My job is advising the vice president, so of course I have to track everything that’s happening. Sargent: Just to really be as clear as possible about this, all these high-level staff, members, and assistants to the president on the National Security Council are sitting around talking about pulling data on the percentages of Republicans in Orange County in order to get the president to approve aid. That’s what happened? Troye: How do you get Donald Trump to move this forward is what it comes down to. Sargent: And this is what you were discussing. This was actually discussed at these high-level meetings. Troye: Yeah.
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