Farah Griffin: ‘Rage and retribution’ would be governing principle in second Trump term

Lauren Irwin
·2-min read

Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin said she thinks “rage and retribution” would be a governing principle for former President Trump if he wins a second term.

Farah Griffin joined Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin to discuss her time in the Trump administration, her resignation, and what she thinks a second Trump term and the new Republican Party would look like.

McLaughlin asked Farah Griffin, who is now a co-host of “The View,” if there is any seriousness to the idea that if Trump wins reelection, he would become a dictator of sorts.

“I think you need to take him literally, but I think you also, I hate to even spend my time trying to be in the mind of Donald Trump, but read the tea leaves a bit about the priorities of things,” she said.

“Rage and retribution are going to be the governing principle, but I think it’s going to start with the biggest deportation program we’ve ever seen,” Farah Griffin continued.

In the weeks since Trump’s guilty verdict in his hush money case, he and his allies have warned that revenge would be coming.

She argued that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program recipients will be deported and there will be a “real chilling effect” on the media across the country. Farah Griffin argued that Trump would tie people up in various lawsuits, “sic the FCC on people making it as difficult as possible to do real journalism, to say anything critical of him.”

Farah Griffin said she wants to caution herself from falling into the “Trump derangement syndrome camp” but she also doesn’t want to “rule anything out.”

“It will at minimum look fundamentally different in this country,” she said.

Farah Griffin, who resigned from the Trump administration in December 2020, noted that one of the things that interested her about working for Trump was that he put some social issues behind him, including marriage equality.

She said the former president never really cared about gay marriage and she thought that could be a good thing for the Republican Party. She then noted that Trump’s allies who are more conservative than he is may influence what happens going forward more than he would.

“Post Dobbs, and you can read it in Clarence Thomas’s decision, he’s starting to talk about things like Obergefell coming down, he references the Loving decision,” Farah Griffin continued. “There are also things that are outside of what Donald Trump himself would do, but that could happen under his Supreme Court. And with cases being brought up from activists, courts in the state, there are those things that it’s less his direct hand in, but just about the direction the country’s going in.”

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