Former President Donald Trump may currently be relentlessly attacking his Republican 2024 presidential primary rival Nikki Haley.
But for Olivia Troye, who served in the Trump White House as an aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, it’s a stark contrast to the previous warm atmosphere between the pair.
Troye, during an appearance on Johanna Maska’s podcast “Press Advance,” said she never heard Trump talking negatively about Haley, whom he appointed as his U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Haley is “probably the only person that I can think of in the administration that got a laudatory farewell in the Oval Office,” she noted. “I’ve never forgotten that moment,” Troye said of Trump’s praise of Haley as he accepted her resignation in front of TV cameras in October 2018.
“Everyone’s forgotten that one, and I sat there watching in shock,” she said.
Troye continued, “I had tremendous respect for her at the time. I worked with her a lot because at the time I had the U.N. portfolio for Pence. And I remember watching that moment with disbelief. Like, wow! He’s just exacting praise and she’s sitting here yucking it up in the Oval.”
“I think that speaks to something there,” she added.
Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who also appeared on the podcast, agreed that Trump had never disparaged Haley in public.
Haley “fit his profile just fine. Attractive woman, always dressed quite well. Nice figure. That type of a thing. So I don’t remember him telling a negative thing about her and I think it’s because she fit his profile,” she explained.
Trump wasn’t so generous to an unnamed lawmaker from Arizona, though, said Grisham.
“I can remember him wanting me to tell a senator in Arizona not to wear sleeveless dresses […] because her arms were very unattractive,” Grisham remembered. Trump told her, “Stephanie, I can’t say it to her, you gotta go tell her.”
