Troye, Olivia

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    Trump Resisted Sending Aid After California Wildfires, Aides Say

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    As California battled the deadliest wildfire in its history in 2018, Donald J. Trump, then the president, initially opposed unlocking federal funding for the state, according to two former Trump administration officials.But Mr. Trump shifted his position after his advisers found data showing that large numbers of his supporters were being affected by the infernos, said the officials, who have both endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential election.Olivia Troye, who was Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland security adviser, said that Mr. Trump had initially instructed Brock Long, then the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not to send “any money” to California, a state that Mr. Trump lost decisively in the 2016 election.Mark Harvey, the senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council in the Trump administration, also recalled Mr. Trump delivering that message in a meeting with Mr. Long. (Mr. Long did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did John R. Bolton, who was the national security adviser at the time.)Ms. Troye said the episode, which was previously reported by E&E News, was not the only time Mr. Trump resisted providing disaster aid to Democratic-leaning regions. She mentioned his response to sending aid to Puerto Rico after it was hit by hurricanes.“We saw numerous instances — this was just one — where it was politicized,” Ms. Troye said in an interview regarding the California episode, adding, “It was red states vs. blue states.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Anti-Trump Republicans Worried About the Biden Campaign

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      Some G.O.P. Trump opponents want to hear more from the Biden campaign. It says it’s on it.Earlier this week, a couple of former Republican members of Congress sent an email to dozens of fellow G.O.P. retirees with a clear and urgent subject line.“Join the Republicans for Biden,” it said. “PLEASE.”The email invited the former lawmakers to a virtual meeting next week with members of President Biden’s campaign team — a meeting that, for many of them, would be their first official interaction with Biden’s re-election campaign since it kicked off last year.Some recipients were quick to offer their help. But multiple people who received the email said it had kicked off a private airing of frustrations among Republicans who, despite publicly supporting Biden in 2020, and in some cases risking their political future to take on Trump, said they had been largely ignored by the campaign and an administration they didn’t always agree with.“A lot of us are wrestling with, how can we support him when he’s gone so far to the left?” said former Representative Chris Shays, Republican of Connecticut, who endorsed Biden in 2020 but said he was “unlikely” to do so again.Back in 2020, a steady stream of Republicans stepped forward and endorsed Biden, representing a narrow but important slice of the electorate: anti-Trump Republicans. That group took a hit this week when Nikki Haley, Trump’s last rival standing in the Republican primary, said she planned to vote for him — a man she frequently described as dangerous.Now, even as Trump lays out a vision for a presidency that could be even more radical than his first, the Republican opposition is in an uneasy place. Some Republicans blame the Biden campaign, saying they’ve heard practically nothing from an operation they think could use their help. And they worry that the omission represents a broader failure to bring moderate Republicans into the fold.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More