Alyssa Farah Griffin gave The View some insight into her time working for the Trump White House on this morning's episode, and even admitted she took the gig thinking she could change the one-term POTUS for the better.before realizing any attempts to do so were futile.
Griffin, who joined The View as a full-time co-host during Season 26, previously worked as Special Assistant to Donald Trump and press secretary to Mike Pence. She left the White House in December 2020, but Trump himself clearly hasn't forgotten her.
In a Monday (June 19) interview with Fox News, Trump claimed Griffin "changed her views" once she joined The View because of the money she was offered for the role. Griffin's View co-hosts immediately came to her defense on today's show, while she reiterated her strong stance that Trump should not serve a second term.
"That was the most striking part to me in that interview," she said, before adding, "I was in more Oval Office meetings with him than I can count. I briefed him in his cabin on Air Force One, I've been on Marine One with him. I know him. I'm telling you he's unfit for office."
Joy Behar, agreeing that Griffin knew Trump "so well," wondered if Griffin thought she could "fix" him, even after hearing his infamous Access Hollywood tape and his disparaging comments about Gold Star families.
"Did you think you could make it better?" Sunny Hostin wondered too, to which Griffin admitted, "Yes. I don't know if it's naive, or maybe it's hubris at the time - it's like one or the other, maybe a weird mix of both - is that you thought you could make him better, you could convince him what's right and what's wrong."
Griffin said that after George Floyd's murder and the protests that followed in the summer of 2020, she "was trying to get [Trump] to walk back a statement he made about 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts.'"
She recalled, "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.' And that was a moment when I was like, 'Oh, this is not a fixable individual.'"
The View airs weekdays at 11/10c on ABC. Watch this morning's segment in the video above.