A former Trump aide becomes a liberal favorite
Now and then during an election cycle, a Republican pundit becomes something of a hero to Democrats.
Peggy Noonan, a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, filled that role in the months leading up the 2008 election, after she had pilloried the second Bush administration over its invasion of Iraq and criticized Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee.
Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt, veterans of John Mccain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, reached pundit primacy on MSNBC by excoriating the Tea Party activists then in ascendance.
A rising star of the current season is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications director for President Donald Trump who is now a co-host of ABC’S “The View” and a regular commentator on CNN.
Farah Griffin, who resigned from the Trump administration in December 2020, garnered wide attention with a tweet she posted on Jan. 6, 2021: “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.”
Three years later, Farah Griffin, 34, spends many of her nights at CNN headquarters in the Hudson Yards district of Manhattan bantering with Van Jones, David Axelrod and other liberal commentators.
“There are a lot of refugees from Trump World who are objects of interest, but not all of them are as comfortable in the medium as she is,” Axelrod said in a phone interview. “She’s very, very fluent. And she’s a great communicator.”
A little after 10 a.m. Tuesday — Super Tuesday, that is — Farah Griffin was seated in her dressing room at ABC Studios on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She was decked out in a hot pink Dolce & Gabbana suit and a pair of nude colored platform heels from Gianvito Rossi. (“From wardrobe,” she said. “Not my own.”)
On her ring finger was a big diamond, a gift from her husband, Justin Griffin, a former political consultant whom she married in 2021 and who now works in venture capital and commercial real estate.
On the table in front of her was a fan letter from an 80-year-old man who described himself as a gay Democrat.
Joy Behar, who has called the MAGA movement a cult, poked her head into the room and demonstrated how invested she was in Farah Griffin’s success by offering some advice aimed squarely at me: “Be nice — or else.”
“She’s relatable”
With guests who more often than not come from the world of entertainment, “The View” is hardly wonky. Just the other day, Farah Griffin interviewed an actor from an off-broadway show, “The Life and Slimes of Marc Summers.” The segment ended with Farah Griffin getting covered in a bucketful of goo.
Yet because the roundtable format involves women from different backgrounds talking about everything from pop culture to abortion, and because “The View” has been for three years running the nation’s highest-rated daytime talk show, its political influence is hard to deny.
In 2010, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to appear on a daytime talk show when he headed to “The View” for a chat. Since then, more than a dozen presidential candidates have stopped by.
ABC’S internal research indicates that the audience for “The View” leans Democratic but has large numbers of independent and unaffiliated voters, said Lauri Hogan, the show’s spokeswoman. The fact that viewers come from a wide range of ethnicities and age groups has also enhanced its appeal among politicians.
The studio audience Tuesday included a Black couple from Arlington, Virginia, who were nearing their 50th wedding anniversary; a white woman in her 40s from outside Philadelphia, who had her nails bedazzled in honor of Rupaul, the episode’s celebrity guest; and an assortment of young gay men from Manhattan.
Whoopi Goldberg kicked things off with a discussion of Super Tuesday.
Voting had begun mere hours before, but the panelists seemed to agree that the day would not end well for Nikki Haley. Behar said she was waiting with dread for Haley to endorse Trump.
“I’m not convinced that she will,” Farah Griffin said. “Listen, the day that will break my heart are two things happening: Nikki Haley endorsing Donald Trump and if Mike Pence does.”
“Prepare to be brokenhearted,” Behar responded.
Farah Griffin said her biggest concern when she auditioned for the show in 2022 was not her ability to fit in with a panel that still skews blue but whether she would be able to hold her own during the lighter segments. She did not play a large role when Rupaul appeared Tuesday to promote his memoir, “The House of Hidden Meanings.” But when the show wrapped at noon, a number of audience members sang her praises.
“She’s relatable to our generation,” said Nate Jobe, 33, who is gay, lives in Hell’s Kitchen and works in content marketing for a hospitality company. “We don’t agree on certain policies, but she’s PRO-LGBT, she believes in human rights and she’s so articulate and easy to understand.”
Robbie Dorius, who works in public relations for a health insurance company, praised Farah Griffin’s openness on the air about the toll her political transformation has taken on her family.
Dorius, 32, was referring mainly to Farah Griffin’s father, Joseph Farah, co-founder and editor-inchief of Worldnetdaily, a website that started in 1997 and predated Infowars as a platform for unfounded conspiracy theories.
In 2007, the site put forth what Farah Griffin now calls the “racist birther conspiracy” about Obama, who was baselessly described there as having been born in Africa. Had it been true, he would have been ineligible to serve as president.
In the mid-1990s, Farah
Griffin’s mother, Judy Farah, a career journalist who worked at the Associated Press, and her father divorced; Farah Griffin spent most of her childhood with her mother in Sacramento, Calif.
Farah Griffin wrote for her father’s website during high school. She went to Patrick Henry College, a conservative Christian school in Purcellville, Virginia, where she majored in public policy and journalism.
In 2014, she went to work as the press secretary for Meadows, the Tea Party Republican serving North Carolina’s 11th congressional district in the House of Representatives.
Farah Griffin said she did not vote for Trump in 2016. “I wrote in Paul Ryan’s name,” she said, referring to the Republican speaker of the House at the time. But she nevertheless accepted an administration job in September 2017, as the press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence.
Two years later, she served in the same role for the Department of Defense. In 2020, Meadows, who was then Trump’s chief of staff, tapped her to become White House communications director.
Whether or not she had swallowed the Trump philosophy whole, she was able to forge relationships with people outside the MAGA nucleus, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases oversaw much of the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis.
In a phone interview, he described Farah Griffin as an “outstanding person” and a “breath of fresh air” who was a “straight shooter” in the darkest days of the pandemic.
“She defended me when I was telling the truth, instead of attacking me the way others did,” Fauci said. “She understood the truth is the truth, whether it’s inconvenient or not.”