U.S. President Donald Trump talks to members of the press at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pennsylvania, U.S., August 3, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
Although conservative Republican Olivia Troye served as a national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence during the first Trump Administration, she resigned from the Trump White House in August 2020 and became a full-fledged Never Trumper. And she was among the conservatives who — along with then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) and former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham — gave presidential nominee Kamala Harris an enthusiastic endorsement at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Troye, in 2024, warned that it would be very bad for the United States if Trump defeated Harris and returned to the White House. And half a year into Trump's second presidency, Troye hasn't changed her view.
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In an op-ed published on her website on August 5, the 48-year-old Troye emphasizes that Trump is responding to information he doesn't like by killing the messenger.
Trump's kill-the-messenger approach, Troye argues, shows up whether Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal over reporting on the president's relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein or firing Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in response to a negative jobs report.
"Trump's denial-and-deflect routine makes sense only if a disclosure poses a threat to him," Troye explains. "And history says that when Trump panics, he reaches for the sharpie. I've seen the scrambling up close. I was in the White House when Trump World realized the public might see something they couldn't control, be it a memo, a meeting summary, or a name on a list. I watched the inner circle pivot into damage-control mode: calls flying, loyalty tested, and narratives rewritten in real-time."
Trump, Troye laments, doesn't respond to a crisis by looking for solutions — he prefers to "fire the facts."
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"July's soft jobs report — 73k jobs, rising unemployment — prompted Trump to sack Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer within hours, calling the data 'RIGGED,'" Troye observes. "Economic truth wasn't friendly, so economic truth-tellers were axed. Also, can he get a tutor and a dictionary and work on expanding his vocabulary? It's old and tired…. Less than a week into his second term, the (Trump) Administration fired 17 inspectors general, the very people who document waste, fraud, and abuse."
According to Troye, Trump is following the same pattern during his second presidency that she witnessed during his first.
That pattern, Troye writes, is: (1) "Discredit the data or the whistle-blower," (2) "Fire the independent overseer," (3) "Rewrite the rules or the code so only the flattering version remains," and (4) "Threaten or sue anyone who publishes or publicly states the inconvenient."
"Epstein is just the loudest flare in this pattern," Troye warns. "Jobs numbers, watchdogs, scientists, and now entire AI models are being shoved into the same black box because transparency is lethal to an administration built on grievance and leverage. Trump doesn’t merely fear prosecution; he fears documentation. Every statistic buried, every website scrubbed, every file redacted is another brick in a wall between the public and the truth."
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Read Olivia Troye's full op-ed at this link.