When he was in the White House, Donald Trump maintained a double stance towards Venezuela: while he publicly criticized the Government, he privately expressed admiration for Nicolás Maduro for being a “strong” man, as the former House advisor revealed to EFE in an interview. Blanca Olivia Troye.
Troye, a lifelong Republican who will vote for Kamala Harris in these elections, told EFE about the “internal conflict” that tormented her during her time in the White House as senior advisor on national security and counterterrorism for the then vice president, Mike Pence. .
One of the situations that most impacted her was the admiration that Trump expressed for dictators and “strong men,” and the naturalness with which he spoke about it in meetings that she herself attended. During one of those meetings, Trump openly praised Nicolás Maduro, whom he denigrated in his public statements.
“I have heard him talk about Maduro, he has supported Maduro. And I was confused in those meetings, because I wondered: here we are saying ‘freedom for Venezuela’, saying all those things, and here is the president affirming that Maduro is strong,” Troye said.
These statements, he explained, generated confusion among White House staff. She herself questioned the true intentions of Trump, who supported Maduro in private while in public he advocated a tough policy to remove him from power.
The feeling that accompanied Troye during his time in the White House was disappointment as he observed a president who did not hesitate to “play politics” instead of governing.
Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric especially affected Troye, since her mother immigrated from Mexico and she herself grew up speaking Spanish in the border city of El Paso (Texas), maintaining constant contact with residents of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua, on the other side of the border.
“When a president uses certain words and expresses himself on these issues, the consequences are felt in our communities,” he said.
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Trump privately praises Maduro for being ‘strong’, former White House adviser reveals
An example of this, he said, is the racist shooting that occurred in 2019 at the Walmart shopping center in his city of El Paso, where 23 people died. The perpetrator of the attack, a white man, published a manifesto expressing his desire to end the “Hispanic invasion,” using language similar to that used by Trump.
Troye’s aunt, of Mexican origin like her mother, was at the mall at the time of the attack and, although she was unharmed, Troye’s heart sank when she heard Trump refer to the event in White House meetings. .
“It was difficult for me because I was watching the president of my party talk about my community and I was thinking about my aunt,” she explained.
Troye left the White House in August 2020, in part due to Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic. At that time, she was in charge of representing Pence on the White House task force on Covid-19 and was able to see firsthand how political interests guided the response to the pandemic.
Just a month later, Troye shook the Republican Party by publishing a video with the group ‘Republican Voters Against Trump’ in which he announced that, despite having grown up in a Catholic home and with Republican values, he was going to vote for Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 elections.
Four years later, Troye is part of the ‘Republicans for Harris’ group and even gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, in which he urged party-less Republicans and independent voters to support Harris to preserve democracy. US.
“I want to see someone in the White House who is responsible, who takes matters seriously when there is a crisis and who is president for everyone, not just one group,” Troye emphasized.
His testimony comes as several former Trump advisers have warned about the risks that a second term would entail. This same week, his former chief of staff, General John Kelly, assured that the former president meets the definition of “fascist” and revealed that during his term he even suggested that Adolf Hitler did some “good things.”
With information from EFE.
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