Former Trump aide explains how the president's own words helped white supremacists

With the US election edging ever closer, it's been interesting to see where the battle lines are being drawn and just how many people who voted for Trump in 2016 will be going back to the president this year.

Given what happened four years ago, it's almost impossible to predict what will happen in November but a steady stream of conservatives have confirmed that they will be voting for Joe Biden this year and not Trump.

This includes former members of his administration, including Elizabeth Neumann who served as his assistant secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy at the Department of Homeland Security and did vote for him in 2016.

However in a brutally honest new advert released by a group called 'Republican Voters Against Trump' she explains why she will be switch to Biden and how Trump's rhetoric actually made her job at Homeland Security harder.

In the two minuted clip, Neumann explains how Homeland Security identifed threats from domestic terrorists with a white supremacist agenda as a major concern to the United States but how Trump's own words helped embolden them.

She says:

A very common refrain that I was asked was, 'Does the president’s rhetoric make your job harder?' And the answer is yes. The president’s actions and his language are, in fact, racist. Things like, 'There are good people on both sides,'or send them back from where they came from,' those words gave permission to white supremacists to think that what they were doing was permissible. 

And I do think that the president’s divisive language is indirectly tied to some of the attacks that we  have seen in the last two years.

She also blames Trump for the devastating results of coronavirus and how he ignored pre-prepared plans for a pandemic and experts in order to preserve the economy.

The reason government is supposed to exist is to plan and prepare for external threats like we’re seeing today with Covid. 

There were plans put in place for a pandemic for 15 years. When we started to see that a pandemic was on its way to our shores  in January, any number of experts told me we need to be executing on these plans. 

But from January until March 11th, what you saw instead was a number of good public servants attempting to do their job and the president telling them to stop,  because he didn’t want the economy to tank and he didn’t want a distraction from his campaign.

I'’m sorry, Mr. President, you were hired to handle America’s worst day, and you’ve absolutely failed.

She concluded:

I do not think that we can afford four more years of President Trump. We are less safe today because of his leadership. We will continue to be less safe as long as he is in control. And this year, I’ll be voting for Joe Biden.

The video, which was shared online on Wednesday has already been viewed more than 3 million times with many feeling that it is a devastating indictment of Trump's presidency.

Trump's 2020 campaign hasn't quite hit the heights of four years ago and many major polls still place the president considerably behind Joe Biden, with just months to go before polls open.