‘Never again’: Meet the former Trump official backing Kamala Harris
Olivia Troye, who served in intelligence in Donald Trump’s administration, says she could not have imagined five years ago that she would be campaigning against him.
As Olivia Troye scrolled through the pages of Project 2025 – the radical right-wing blueprint for a second Donald Trump term – it only reinforced her belief that she had been right to resign.
“I essentially saw a draft of it while I was in the White House – the purging of civil servants, the restriction on abortions,” said Troye, who served in Trump’s administration before stepping down in a very public rebuke of the “chaotic and destructive” former president in August 2020.
“Having seen what I saw and heard what I did, I thought ‘never again can this man be allowed to serve in office’.”
She had early doubts about Trump, but agreed to work with his administration in the belief that the property mogul-turned-reality TV star would rise to the position. “I soon realised I was wrong,” she said.
Troye, 47, a self-described “John McCain conservative” who was born in Texas, served as a George W. Bush administration appointee in the Pentagon. For the first half of Trump’s term, Troye then worked at the Department of Homeland Security, as a career intelligence official, before being detailed to the staff of the vice-president, Mike Pence.
Not only did the lifelong Republican repudiate Trump, she began working against him with the opposing side.
Over the years she has become a prominent conservative voice for the Democratic Party, and this week she was asked to join the newly launched Republicans for Harris. Other members of the group include politicians who were already openly critical of Trump, including Bill Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, Denver Riggleman, the former representative of Virginia, and Stephanie Grisham, the former White House press secretary.
The Harris team has described it as a “campaign within a campaign”, using well-known GOP figures “to activate their networks” with a particular emphasis on the millions of voters who backed Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador, in the primaries.
The outreach from Republicans to Republicans is using targeted ads in swing states to convince independents and undecided conservatives that Harris – a former California prosecutor and attorney general – is not a “San Francisco radical” and that the 78-year-old former president does not share their values.
Troye, the daughter of a truck-driver father and a Mexican immigrant mother, said she could not have imagined five years ago that she would be stumping for one of the most liberal presidential tickets in recent US history.
“When I speak to conservatives and independents on the fence, like me they just want to go back to normalcy,” Troye said. “I think a lot of the things that I hear from Republicans is how upset they are at what the party has become and how dysfunctional it is. They want it to find its way again.”
As a national-security expert she said she had grave concerns about a second Trump term. “You don’t worry with Kamala Harris that our security will be imperilled, or that she will dismantle NATO and our longstanding relationship with allies,” she said.
“It will be a scorched-earth type of presidency,” she said, with Trump no longer reined in by moderating influences. “In his first term at least, Trump was surrounded by experienced people like [Mark] Esper, [Jim] Mattis, and [John] Kelly,” she said, referring to two former defence secretaries and a White House chief of staff. “What serious person will want to serve him this time around?”
One of the “saddest” things, Troye said, was Trump’s “contempt” for his supporters. “I’ve seen it first hand – him calling them ‘disgusting’. I’m the epitome of the American working class, and I can tell you he has absolutely nothing in common with them.”
Asked previously about her regrets, Troye said that she wished she had spoken out more internally, particularly in relation to the rising threat of Covid-19 at the time. She wrestled with many “sleepless nights” about her actions in the administration.
Troye believes Team Trump has faltered in responding to the unexpected surge of momentum behind Harris and had difficulty in finding a message that hits home against the vice-president, unlike with President Biden. Troye said one of the biggest inroads the group was making was with suburban women turned off by Trump and his running-mate JD Vance’s proposals to restrict reproductive rights.
“I think it’s a very complicated issue for conservative-leaning women,” she said. “Women are not OK with what we’re seeing in states like Texas, where abortion is almost outlawed. I think Kamala has struck the right tone, describing it as being about your private faith - a conversation with your priest, your doctor and your family, not a conversation with the government.”
Vance and other religious conservatives have advocated a near-blanket ban on terminations, even in cases of rape or incest - a stance mirrored in the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank’s Project 2025 report.
The 900-plus-page proposal, its authors and its relationship with the Trump campaign have made for one of the most hotly debated questions of the 2024 race. Harris’s team has seized on the report as evidence of an extreme second-term agenda. The plan’s more drastic proposals include the removal of 5,000 civil servants to be replaced with Trump loyalists, the criminalising of pornography and a total ban on the abortion pill.
Trump, meanwhile, has sought to distance himself from it, although this has been made difficult by new reports that he told a Heritage Foundation event in 2022: “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
He has denied knowing the people behind Project 2025. However, Trump was seen sharing a 45-minute private flight with Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, in April 2022.
“If you look at Project 2025, it invokes God throughout,” Troye said of its Christian nationalist ideas on family. “I grew up in a very Catholic family and respect that way of life, but I’m also a big believer in the separation of church and state. I mean, they talk about the government monitoring of miscarriages, it’s Handmaid’s Tale stuff,” she said, referring to Margaret Atwood’s book about a dystopian and totalitarian patriarchal society.
“When Trump says he has nothing to do with it, you can’t believe him. I was in the White House with its architects,” said Troye. “No one should think that they cannot carry this out because they have been building the groundwork for years now. They learned the lesson from the first time around, and felt that they had not properly prepared.”
Troye spent time with Harris last month while moderating a panel on abortion rights in Michigan. “I walked away thinking ‘I’ll do anything I can to help this woman win’, which took me by surprise a bit,” she said. “She’s engaging, super smart, and I honestly think Trump is a bit intimidated by her.” She said Trump and some of his allies “sit there and disparage her for her race, her looks, for her laugh. They do so because it’s a distraction from their own lack of policy ideas.”
Troye and some of the two dozen other Republicans for Harris will travel across swing states in the coming weeks, aware of the challenges of persuading conservatives to support a candidate they may disagree with on a range of subjects.
Critics wonder whether a country bitterly divided by cultural questions around race, gender and family is ready for a woman of colour as commander-in-chief. According to a recent YouGov poll, 41 per cent of Americans assume that more than half of their fellow countrymen would not be willing to vote for a woman over a man if the two candidates were equally qualified.
“We see a lot of double standards in how male and female candidates are covered, no doubt,” said Troye. “Hillary Clinton came at the wrong time, but I think she paved the way for Kamala and this moment.
“I’m hopeful that this is going to be the time where we overcome that.”
The Times
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