Two former Trump administration officials have gone on record to deliver alarming new details about his approach to providing disaster relief to American citizens.
In an interview with E&E News, Mark Harvey, Trump’s one-time senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, revealed that the former president heavily resisted signing off on disaster aid to wildfire-afflicted California because it had voted heavily against him in the 2016 presidential election.
Harvey says he finally convinced Trump to authorize disaster relief to the state one time by pulling up voting results showing a significant concentration of Republican voters in Orange County.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas... to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey explained.
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Harvey added that Trump only saw providing disaster relief solely through the lens of his own political benefit.
"There’s no empathy for the survivors," he said. "It is all about getting your photo-op, right? Disaster theater to make him look good.”
Harvey's account was backed up by fellow former Trump official Olivia Troye, who revealed that she often had to go to Vice President Mike Pence to get Trump to fulfill his basic duty to provide help to Americans struggling in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
She also warned that this would only be worse in a second Trump term where there wouldn't be anyone like her or Harvey to curb Trump's worst impulses.
"It’s not going to be about that American voter out there who isn’t even really paying attention to politics, and their house is gone, and the president of the United States is judging them for how they voted, and they didn’t even vote," she said.
