Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House staffer and co-host of The View , stated on a segment of the show on June 20 that while serving as former president Donald Trump’s communications director in 2020, she attempted to change him and his office from the inside out.
Griffin, who worked for Mike Pence from 2017 to 2019 before joining Trump’s team in 2020, shared the moment she first knew she wanted to quit the White House staff. This revelation came as the panel reviewed Trump’s Monday evening interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, per Entertainment Weekly .
“I know him. I’m telling you he’s unfit for office.” Alyssa Farah Griffin didn’t mince words when it came to her former boss Donald Trump on #TheView : https://t.co/ylBXoB8TVz pic.twitter.com/3RCMzHzdGm
— Decider (@decider) June 20, 2023
“I don’t know if it’s naive or maybe it was hubris at the time — it’s like, one or the other, maybe a weird mix of both. You thought you could make him better, you could convince him of what’s right and what’s wrong,” the 34-year-old responded after veteran co-host Joy Behar questioned her choice to work for such a divisive political figure as Trump.
Griffin continued, “George Floyd, after his murder and the social justice protests that summer, I was trying to get him to walk back a statement he made about saying, ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ I was like, ‘Surely that’s not what you mean. No one thinks we should be shooting people in the public square,’ and he essentially said no, that’s what I mean, we’re not walking it back. That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this is not a fixable individual.’ That was the first time I almost resigned.”
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Griffin was chastised by Trump in an interview he gave to Fox News earlier this week for allegedly switching sides on him after she resigned in late 2020. This backlash came despite the fact that she has long spoken out against Trump and even begged him to call off his supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “Something happens when people leave… I have this woman named Alyssa Farah, she said the greatest things long after she left,” Trump alleged on Fox .
‘The View’ Fact-Checks Donald Trump On Alyssa Farah Griffin Claim Former President Donald Trump offered up his usual barrage of unfounded claims and falsehoods during his interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier Monday night, but the co-hosts of ABC’s The View want to… pic.twitter.com/5vFJsmZoY3
— Soulwell Publishing Group® (@SoulwellPublish) June 20, 2023
Trump also alleged that Farah only changed her views on him once she joined The View. “Then The View offered her a contract, but obviously only if she changed her views, and all of a sudden she could say negative things. Money gets offered to people and some people change.”
Co-host Sara Haines defended Griffin from the sharp criticism Trump leveled at his former employee. Haines, who has also taken criticism from fellow The View stars over her involvement with Trump, said of her colleague: “Alyssa, just to clear your name, your name was shouted out at one point. Let me just remind him that the second he started denying the election was when Alyssa left. It was a year and a half later with her view highly changed that she came to this show.”
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Jun 21, 2023. It has since been updated.