In going from the Trump White House to a media career, she has made adaptations.
In going from the Trump White House to a media career, she has made adaptations.
I n a February 2021 appearance on CNN, Alyssa Farah, who had recently stepped down as a communications director for the Trump White House, said it was “important for members of Congress to step up and condemn” the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “And many have done that. I think Kevin McCarthy — you know, I give the leader credit — spoke out very plainly about the president’s role in it.” But when pressed on censuring President Trump, she demurred: “I think it’s an open question for Congress — I’m not going to play judge and jury on that,” she told the CNN host. “But I also think the country needs to move on from this moment. I don’t think we benefit from re-litigating, over and over, what happened that day. We need to be moving forward.”
Three months later, the former Trump official appeared on MSNBC with a different message: “This isn’t going away. So to my friends, to the Kevin McCarthys of the world — this is not just something that you’re going to brush aside.” Five months after that, Farah, who had by then secured a spot as a CNN contributor and was auditioning for the nominal right-wing seat on The View, took an even more forceful line: “We are just acting like this is kind of normal, I feel like we’re just glossing over January 6 and moving on, and we absolutely shouldn’t. The committee is working on it, I hope they get to the bottom of it. But it’s devastating.”
The change in tone and emphasis was part of a broader transformation for Farah, now Farah Griffin. The 33-year-old got her start in right-wing politics at World Net Daily — the blog run by her father, Joseph Farah, that is widely credited with popularizing the Barack Obama birther conspiracy. After her stint at WND, she entered the Republican Party fray as a communications director for the House Freedom Caucus. In 2017, she joined the Trump administration as a press secretary for Mike Pence, later moving to a similar role in the Department of Defense. Then, in April 2020, she took a job as director of strategic communications for the White House Office. Prior to her departure from the White House that December, Farah was, by all accounts, a conventionally partisan Republican operative. But as she has pivoted to presenting herself as fervently anti-Trump — and sometimes anti-Republican — her statements have shifted dramatically. On a number of controversies surrounding Trump, she has gone from defending his actions to condemning them. In tandem, she’s blasting many Republicans whose rhetoric aligned with her own not so long ago.
In a texted statement to National Review, Farah Griffin wrote:
I reject the premise that my fundamental views have changed. But I’m fiercely anti insurrection. I’m a conservative who believes in limited federal government and a robust national defense. I do, however, think that most people who have served in the highest levels of government, who hold the highest level security clearances, as I do, often become less dogmatic in their views as they learn more and are exposed to more.
When asked, as a follow-up, whether she regretted working for Mark Meadows, she did not respond.
Nevertheless, the public posture of the Alyssa Farah Griffin of 2022 is very different from the one she had while in the Trump administration. Today, Farah Griffin has made her outrage over the Capitol riot a centerpiece of her persona, live-tweeting the January 6 hearings and routinely denouncing Republicans — including Republicans such as Ron DeSantis — for not being forceful enough in their condemnations of the riot, the election-fraud claims, and Trump and his allies. But these recent vociferous critiques of the GOP’s line on these issues stand in stark contrast to her own comments in the months leading up to and following the election.
In December 2021, Farah Griffin slammed Georgia Senate candidate David Perdue for “wink, winking and nod, nodding to the election fraud myths.” But she herself employed similar rhetoric during, and even after, her time in the White House, repeatedly raising concerns about election fraud and even alluding to a “rigged election.” In May 2020, she defended Trump for “rais[ing] concerns about across the board mail-in voting w/out reason because of its potential for fraud,” and argued: “If you care about the integrity & security of our elections, you should care about protecting against potential voter fraud.” In November 2020, on a radio segment discussing the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to the Pennsylvania vote count, she attacked state election officials for “putting their thumb on the scale” to help Democrats. In a January 2021 Fox News appearance, she defended Trump’s leaked phone call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, arguing that “what he’s saying he wants to do is get to the bottom of irregularities, and it’s not just in Georgia, it’s in other states.” In February 2021, she criticized Democrats for having “refused outright to have serious conversations about voter fraud in this country,” adding, “This is something Republicans have been, you know, tooting the horn on for years.” Perhaps most notably, in a December 2020 appearance on Fox, discussing election-integrity efforts in the upcoming Senate runoffs in Georgia, she said:
The Georgia Republican Party has . . . efforts underway to ensure that we have signature verification, that we have poll watchers. But what we’re really trying to convey to voters — and listen, understanding that millions of Americans have concerns about irregularities and fraud that we saw in the 2020 elections — what we’re conveying to Georgia voters, is that if you . . . don’t want a rigged election, you absolutely have to get out and vote.
The shift in tone goes beyond the question of January 6 and the 2020 election. In a December 2020 Fox appearance, for instance, Farah said that Hunter Biden’s corruption was “a huge issue that we’ve got to get to the bottom of” — a point she reiterated a month later, tweeting: “Under a Democrat controlled Senate, Republicans can kiss their ability to investigate issues like FBI abuse and Hunter Biden’s China & Russia connections goodbye.” But a few months later, in September 2021, she was maintaining that “while the public 1,000% had a right to see it,” she had “advised Trump world against making Hunter a focal point of the campaign.” In March this year, she argued that while the Department of Justice should “thoroughly investigate any potential impropriety,” Hunter Biden’s “actions don’t even rank in the top 100 issues facing American voters.”
In terms of Trump himself, Farah Griffin maintains that she “didn’t have any illusions about who the president was.” In a glowing May Vanity Fair profile, replete with glamorous photos of Farah sipping cocktails and posing in limos, she argued: “I’m not somebody who drank the Kool-Aid for five years and then magically found Jesus on January 6.” But that, too, is at odds with her public statements in the White House. In one video taken during her time in the administration, she describes her first time meeting Trump: “I was smiling so wide because I was just excited to see him.” In having “gotten to spend quite a bit of time with him” in following months, she added, “I remember this every day as I walk on the campus — just to stop, say a quick prayer of thank you and gratitude” every day “that I get to serve this particular president.” She went on: “He’s a remarkable man. The more time you spend with him behind closed doors, the more you understand what makes him such a strong leader for our nation.” At the same time, she attacked Miles Taylor — the erstwhile midlevel Trump official who penned the infamous anonymous New York Times op-ed about the “resistance” within the White House — as “confirm[ing] that “Never Trumpers are trying to thwart POTUS.” In January 2021, she told Politico that she didn’t “have respect” for Taylor. A year later, however, she was participating in group phone calls led by Taylor “to discuss efforts to fend off [Trump’s] efforts to, in their view, erode the democratic process,” according to CNN.
Farah Griffin has continued to espouse some conservative positions publicly, including defending the pro-life argument on The View earlier this year. But when the topic turns to anything Trump-related, she is reading from a decidedly different playbook these days. In the administration, for instance, she touted Trump’s “leadership” on Covid, boasting that Trump had “NEVER stopped working to defeat the virus since before it ever even came to American shores,” and arguing that “it’s the Republicans who are serious about getting aid to Americans, not the democrats.” Today, she claims that “Donald Trump politicized the hell out of the virus.” On allegations of extremism, she defended Trump’s “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by” comment in the presidential debates, arguing that “there isn’t anything to clarify”; prior to that, she dismissed a former Department of Homeland Security official’s claims that Trump was “refusing to condemn” right-wing extremism as “a case of this former disgruntled employee being ineffective at their job.” But in a May 2021 MSNBC appearance, she said that “as a brown woman — I’m Lebanese and Syrian — it [was] challenging” to work in the administration, adding that she wanted Trump to “condemn white supremacy — that shouldn’t be hard. Pulling teeth and making it something difficult was just an unnecessary thing.”
In the Vanity Fair profile, Farah Griffin claimed that “at no point in my entire life was my goal to be on TV and be a talking head.” But it’s hard to see her political transformation as anything other than an audition for the mainstream spotlight. The news that she was taking a position as a CNN contributor in December 2021 reportedly came on the heels of a year of searching for TV contracts. (In November 2020, Fox News reported that Farah “has been interviewing with TV agents since before the election,” and “is now actively looking for a job in a post-Trump world.” She denies that she met with agents before leaving the administration.) Farah did a slate of Fox appearances soon after leaving the White House, but when the network snagged former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, its bookers “just stopped asking,” she admitted to Vanity Fair. “There are some realities on [the] ground,” one of her former colleagues told the magazine. After Fox got McEnany, Farah “had to adapt to some extent.”
And adapt she did.