Trump Cared More About Fox News Being Mean to Him Than Saving American Lives According to Top Pence Aide

President Donald Trump was allegedly unfocused in coronavirus task force meetings, according to reports, and cared more about Fox News coverage than the task at hand.

These are new details to emerge about what drove President Trump during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, at least according to Olivia Troye, who, until she left the White House last month, served as Vice President Mike Pence’s former top advisor on Homeland Security.

The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser interviewed Troye Thursday, which she discussed during a Friday morning appearance on CNN’s New Day. Glasser told host Alisyn Camerota that, according to Troye, Trump often derailed coronavirus task force meetings and was “only focused solely on the election.”

She also noted “several times” when President Trump would enter the room of a coronavirus task force meeting, and participants  “would try to get him to focus on the business at hand,” but that Trump would instead “be ranting and raving about Fox News and how they weren’t being nice enough to him.”

The American death toll from Covid-19 is nearly 200,000 citizens.

This observation is consistent with her reporting published earlier in The New Yorker:

During our interview, I asked Troye if she could remember other particularly memorable times when Trump spoke privately to the group. She recalled how Trump refused several times to consider urgent business that the task force presented to him, deciding “to talk about himself and a preferred news network and how upset he was with them, instead of focussing on the agenda at hand.” Fox News coverage, in other words, preoccupied the President more than saving American lives. I asked Troye if that shocked her. “No,” she said. She remembered what she thought at the time: “This is exactly what you would expect.”

The self-described lifelong Republican who served Vice President Pence as he took over the White House Coronavirus Task Force in March. She made news on Thursday when Republican Voters Against Trump released a two-minute video in which Troye claims she saw first hand Trump’s callous and dismissive response to the Covid-19 pandemic, including a moment where she claimed to have witnessed Trump laud a hidden benefit of social distancing in saying “I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people.”

Watch above via CNN.

Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com