Ex-White House aide says Trump should ‘seriously consider’ resigning

Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah said Friday that President Trump should “seriously consider” resigning and acknowledged that he lied to the American public about the 2020 election.

Farah, who resigned from her position in December, during an interview on CNN accused Trump of carrying out a “stunt” in claiming falsely that he won the election and said that she left her position following the election because she did not want to be involved in peddling lies to the public.

Farah also admitted that she would feel safer if Trump, who has less than two weeks left in his term, resigned from office.

“I think it’s something that he should seriously consider. I don’t think that when you’ve got just a number of days left there’s any need to carry on the kind of charade of an impeachment, the people’s house needs to get back to work,” Farah said, disagreeing with lawmakers considering impeaching Trump a second time.

“We need to get aid to tens of millions of Americans. But listen, I think that Vice President Pence has stepped in as the real leader, getting the National Guard during this crisis that unfolded,” Farah said.

The remarks represented a notable rebuke of Trump by a top White House official just more than a month after she left the administration. Farah had been relatively silent on Trump’s election claims until this week.

.@JohnBerman: “Will you say that … Donald J. Trump lied to the American people?”

Former White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah: “He did, on the election … We knew that it was a stunt to carry this on for days longer.”https://t.co/bhtQcFQydj pic.twitter.com/lxzR9vM6wg

— New Day (@NewDay) January 8, 2021

On Wednesday, she implored Trump to condemn his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol after he urged them to “fight” and repeated his false claims about winning the election. Trump at first called the rioters “special” and only condemned the violence in a video message Thursday evening after he came under enormous pressure to do so.

During her interview Friday, Farah defended the actions of Pence, for whom she served as a spokeswoman at the beginning of the administration, calling him a man of “conviction” and “integrity” for following the Constitution and presiding over Congress as it certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the early hours of Thursday morning despite public pressure from Trump to overturn the results.

Farah announced her resignation on Dec. 3, but at the time she did not raise concerns publicly about Trump’s rhetoric disputing Biden’s election win.

Instead, she described it as an “honor of a lifetime” to serve in the Trump administration, touting its foreign and domestic policy priorities. She did not mention Trump in her statement and said she was leaving to pursue new opportunities.

Farah had been a frequent presence on television discussing the administration’s response to the coronavirus and other actions, but she was absent from the airwaves following Trump’s election loss and never publicly defended his efforts to contest the results.

Farah maintained Friday that she believed in the policy agenda of the Trump administration but said she would not back Trump if he ran for office again.

Asked how she would respond to critics who say that she is speaking out now to clean up her own reputation, Farah said she is proud of her work in the White House and said it was always her belief that “it’s better to be in the room and try to influence outcomes for the better than to cede that position of authority to somebody who may not have the best interests of the country at heart.”