“TRIGGERING MAGA WORLD”: CONSERVATIVE MEDIA’S SUDDENLY URGENT CAMPAIGN TO DISCREDIT EX-TRUMP AIDES

Conservative media piling onto Alyssa Farah Griffin for a post-Trump rebrand that occurred more than a year ago speaks to the impact of Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony and the ongoing January 6 hearings. 

On Thursday, the National Review, a conservative magazine, published a story about Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former White House communications director under Donald Trump. “What Happened to Alyssa Farah?”

That the right-wing media is going after Farah Griffin now, by highlighting a transformation that occurred more than a year ago, speaks to the precarious moment the GOP is in. Trump is basically saying he’s going to run again as the January 6 Committee continues to paint a vivid and damning picture of how the former president tried to thwart democracy to hold onto power, and obstruct the ongoing investigation—primarily sourced to a growing chorus of his own former officials and allies. Farah Griffin hasn’t testified publicly at the January 6 hearings, but she’s a source of potential corroboration. When Cassidy Hutchinson, the 26-year-old former White House staffer who appeared as a live witness at a hearing earlier this month gave her explosive testimony—key aspects of which Trump has denied, including the allegation that he tried to grab the steering wheel when the Secret Service refused to let him join his supporters at the Capitol on January 6—Farah Griffin, 33, revealed on CNN that she was responsible for putting Hutchinson, a close personal friend (with whom she shares a former boss, Meadows) in touch with Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the January 6 committee, and encouraged Hutchinson to testify. As Politico reported earlier this week, Hutchinson, Farah Griffin and others have become part of a “small, lonely girls club,” as one woman put it to the outlet, of “exiled” Trump aides and lawmakers, who are making their stories public.

Trumpworld and its conservative media allies have taken notice. 

As Politico reported, other members of this unofficial support network include Olivia Troye, 45, who resigned as homeland security adviser under Vice President Mike Pencein August 2020; and Sarah Matthews, 27, and Stephanie Grisham, 45, both of whom resigned on January 6. Their informal leaders are former GOP Rep. Barbara Comstockand Cheney. Grisham, Farah Griffin, Hutchinson, and Matthews have all sat for depositions with the Jan. 6 committee, and Matthews is reportedly expected to testify publicly, as Hutchinson did, at an upcoming public hearing. “I do think people seeing all of us women supporting one another is triggering MAGA world in a pretty big way,” Grisham, the Trump press secretary who never held a press conference, told me, pointing to the sexist nature of many of the attacks coming her way, such as an Instagram DM that said, “Die you f—ing lying C—T.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/triggering-maga-world-conservative-medias-suddenly-urgent-campaign-to-discredit-ex-trump-aides