It may appear that Alyssa Farah Griffin is on top of the world. Evenings she weighs in on news and politics on CNN. Weekdays she’s one of the female hosts of ABC’s “The View,” TV’s most popular daytime program, which has only grown more popular since she joined the team in 2022.
But profiles of the former Trump administration spokesperson show she’s still dealing with traumas resulting from her sudden and public disavowal of MAGA World.
She worked as a press representative for congressman Mark Meadows starting in 2014 before serving Vice President Mike Pence, the Defense Department and the Trump White House as assistant to President Trump and the director of strategic communications.
White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah, Senior Communications Advisor Ben Williamson, Principal Assistant Press Secretary Chad Gilmartin, Executive Assistant to the Press Secretary Lyndee Rose and Advisor to the Press Secretary Baxter Murrell attend White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s first on-camera news conference in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House May 01, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
After helping promote Trump’s false claims of a “rigged election,” she realized she was no longer “buying what I was selling.” She resigned Jan. 3, 2021.
On January 6, she pleaded with Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, to get Trump to tell his followers to stop attacking the U.S. Capitol. Then she sealed her fate in Trump world with a Tweet:
Dear MAGA — I am one of you. Before I worked for @realDonaldTrump, I worked for @MarkMeadows & @Jim_Jordan & the @freedomcaucus. I marched in the 2010 Tea Party rallies. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.
The blowback was immediate. Former friends and co-laborers branded her a traitor. Her father, a hero to many conservatives, has not spoken to her since January 6. He did not attend her 2021 wedding to Justin Griffin, a former political consultant, nor did 50 other invitees.
“I basically set my world on fire, doing what I thought was right,” she says now.
Cassidy Hutchinson attends a conversation with Alyssa Farah Griffin at The 92nd Street Y, New York on October 30, 2023, in New York City. (Photo by Dominik Bindl/Getty Images)
Her deconversion from the movement she calls “the cult of MAGA” accompanied a crisis in her Christian faith, a subject she did not discuss in profiles in The New York Times and Vanity Fair, or an interview with the PBS show “Frontline.” (ABC declined BNG’s 2023 request for an interview with Griffin about her faith journey.)
She willingly and forcefully testified before the U.S. House of Representatives January 6 Committee and she encouraged former Trump administration workers Cassidy Hutchinson and Sarah Matthews to do the same.
Today, the three MAGA refugees join with Trump’s former vice president and the majority of Trump’s former cabinet officials in speaking out against returning Trump to an office they say he is unfit to fill.
“I do believe that media is the way I can have the most influence in the shortest period of time,” Griffin said in a recent profile. She makes her views known both on CNN and during the political segments of “The View,” which has featured never-Trumpers Liz Cheney and Chris Christie.
The transformation of this former conservative’s conservative, and one of Patrick Henry College’s most famous D.C. alumni, has been too much for many conservatives. “What Happened to Alyssa Farah?” asked National Review.
Joseph Farah
Her father has been asking the same question. After years working in mainstream journalism, Joseph Farah launched WorldNetDaily in 1997. The right-wing outlet promotes conspiracy theories and pushed the theory that Barack Obama was not an American citizen and therefore an illegitimate president.
“I understand what Obama is and what he is doing because I was once like him: I am a former communist,” Farah wrote in 2012.
He’s less involved in WorldNetDaily after suffering a stroke in 2019, but recent headlines exhibit his rhetorical style:
- “Supremes Abandon Parents Whose Son was Taken by State”
- “Jack Smith May Press ‘Red Button’ to Disqualify Judge and Get Trump”
- “American Imam Claims that Right Now, Fall of Israel Is ‘Imminent’”
- America Has Morphed Into … OPPOSITE LAND: A Stunning Tour of the Left’s Total Inversion of Morality, History and Reality”
- “Abortion Is a Winning Issue for Republicans”
The fear-based articles are supported by fear-based ads:
- “As Americans Scramble to Protect Retirement Accounts With Physical Gold and Silver, A Faith-Based Company Shows Them How”
- “Americans Can Stockpile Ivermectin & Key Prescription Medicines — Here Is One Way To Do It”
Farah’s daughter sees speaking out now as a way of atoning for the many years she spent drinking extremist Kool-Aid and promoting it to others.
“I would be lying if I said my father’s company and role in the current state of right-wing media wasn’t a factor in me feeling, um, convicted and compelled to knock down disinformation,” she said in a recent profile.
Related articles:
Can you hear him now? | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
Broken-hearted patriotism | Opinion by David Gushee
