On April 14, Resistance activist/grifter Olivia Troye — who has spent years cashing in on her role as a former aide to then-Vice President Mike Pence in the first Trump administration — revealed she would run for Congress in one of Virginia’s now-gerrymandered districts and has a chance of winning, thanks to at least 340 appearances on far-left, elite media cable channels CNN and MS NOW between 2020 and her campaign announcement.
Media Research Center analysts searched Nexis transcripts and Snapstream closed captioning using multiple spellings of Troye’s name to chart each and every interview she’s sat for since she quit the administration in the throes of the Covid pandemic to curry public favor as a hero willing to call out a dangerous, deadly presidency.
CNN contributed 92 hits to the tally on 29 different shows or specials, including her six combined sightings in 2026 (March 18’s Laura Coates Live) and 2025 (three on Laura Coates Lives, one on The Arena, and one on CNN News Central).
Specifically, her lone 2026 appearance (prior to her campaign) was to pile on the Trump administration following Joe Kent’s resignation from the National Counterterrorism Center. In 2025, she weighed in on topics such as the Justice Department (DOJ) raiding John Bolton’s home, DOJ leak investigations, the Epstein files, and what constitutes Republican values.
2022 marked the year Troye most often appeared on CNN with 38 bookings, centering around the Pelosi-picked January 6 Committee hearings.
With 11 appearances each, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and Erin Burnett OutFront tied for first place in which CNN show valued her predicable and vapid anti-Trump commentaries. Numerous iterations of CNN Tonight — both the Don Lemon-helmed editions and those after he left — were just behind at 10.
On her third ever CNN appearance (the September 29 New Day), Troye awed co-host John Berman with the declaration that she had been through a “moral struggle” of whether to speak out against Trump because she’s “constantly trying to do the right thing” as “national security professional” and “[s]aving lives is what I’m focused on” by demanding Americans vote Democrat and root for Trump’s imprisonment.
Fast-forward to July 2023 and, during a CNN This Morning hit, Troye denounced Republican criticism of the FBI because doing so “erod[es] at the fibers of what our country is based on.”
Troye avoided serious criticism on either network. Instead, she was treated like a seasoned stateswoman, including on July 18’s CNN Newsroom where she told then-host Jim Acosta that Kamala Harris’s 2024 Democratic ticket was “democracy in action” despite Harris never having received a single primary vote from the American people.
The artist formerly known as MSNBC pulled in the lion’s share of appearances with 248 on 37 different shows and specials.
Between 2020 and 2024, Troye appeared on what was then MSNBC no less than 40 times a year with 2021 being the highest at an astounding 69 appearances, which works out to an appearance roughly every five days.
Perhaps the least surprising statistic of all was that Nicolle Wallace’s Deadline: White House — which one could refer to as the Rich, White, Liberal, Wine Mom Story Hour — blew all MSNBC shows away as Troye joined Wallace’s show 41 times, followed by Joy Reid’s The ReidOut (36), Velshi (32), Alex Witt Reports/Weekends with Alex Witt (30), and All In with Chris Hayes (26).
For an example of her chumminess with Wallace, the host complained to her on the August 19, 2021 Deadline: White House that Republicans are the “gravest terrorist threat” to the country, not any Islamist group like al-Qaeda or ISIS.
“I think you nailed it and I think it makes this problem that much more complex and more challenging for our homeland security enterprise,” Troye replied.
Over with Reid, Troye insisted on the November 10, 2021 ReidOut that Republicans were poised to rig the 2022 midterms (they didn’t) and Trump voters “don’t care about our democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law,” or their fellow “Americans.”
By September 2024, Troye agreed with Reid in predicting a second Trump administration would result in illegal immigration detention centers that, in Reid’s description, “will look like concentration camps in Germany[.]”
Troye, along with a number of other former Trump officials or Republicans who became Democrats and even candidates, were at the beck and call of these networks anytime they needed someone who served in the first Trump administration to assert how half the country is a danger to the rest.
Her act may work as, while her lobster-shaped district would span from Arlington County to west of I-81, she would never have to leave Falls Church City or Arlington and Fairfax Counties to win or even serve in Congress. Such constituents would be alien to her.
