Former Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland security adviser Olivia Troye has claimed that former President Donald Trump used to mock his “Make America Great Again” followers behind closed doors.
On The View, co-host Sunny Hostin pointed to a Tuesday poll by Morning Consult that showed the former president with 61 per cent of GOP primary support. Hostin then asked Ms Troye, “Why do you think so many people still have this blind loyalty to him? What does that say about the party now?”
“Well, I think it speaks to an unfortunate state of the Republican Party,” Ms Troye replied. “It is certainly not the party that I want it to be and not the party that I believe it has been in the past.”
“I think he has done a great job of sort of marketing himself as the champion for all of these people who are behind him in this movement,” she continued. “But, like, we’ve sat in these meetings. What is so frustrating and angering to me is he has nothing in common with any of his supporters and I detest the way he speaks about them.”
The way he spoke “was so disparaging to them,” she described.
“I think about my own family members who, by the way, are very unhappy with me. I have a lot of family members who are still Trump supporters, and they’re very upset that I’m a Trump critic. I think about them and I’m like, ‘I hate the way you speak about them sometimes behind closed doors,’” Ms Troye said.
This isn’t the first time the former president was accused of deriding his fanbase.
His former fixer Michael Cohen told The Atlantic in 2020 about a time on the campaign trail that his boss allegedly mocked his Christian following. “They’re all hustlers,” Mr Trump allegedly said.
The former president remains a frontrunner for the Republican nomination by a mile. While the Morning Consult poll showed Mr Trump carrying 61 per cent of the vote, the next closest, Ron DeSantis, had only 12 per cent. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, Mr Pence, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie trail in the polls.
