Disaster relief efforts came 'to a halt' solely because of Trump's inaction: ex-official

Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser in the Trump White House, shed new light this week on former President Donald Trump's highly politicized approach to disaster relief.

In an interview with The New Republic's Greg Sargent, Troye explained how difficult it could be to try to get help out to Americans suffering from the impact of natural disasters because Trump would often sit on emergency declarations for days.

"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," she explained. "It was frustrating, as you can imagine, because we as national security officials serve for the greater good of the country."

Troye then explained how her former boss, Vice President Mike Pence, had to push to get Trump to show some urgency in signing the declaration.

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"I can think of a time when even Mike Pence was flying out. I believe he was flying to California and he called me," she said. "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."

Troye's revelations follow bombshell claims made earlier this week by Mark Harvey, Trump’s one-time senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, about the former president being reluctant to help out residents of California because the state had strongly voted against him in the 2016 election.

In one instance, Harvey said 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.