Former White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah cautioned any Republicans against thinking President Donald Trump won't dominate post-election influence through 2024, even now that "it looks like he didn't win" in 2020.
Farah resigned from her three-and-a-half year role as Trump's communications director in early December in a move many Washington insiders viewed as tacit acknowledgment of the president's re-election loss to Joe Biden. Farah on Monday appeared to verbalize this new-found realization, telling the Associated Press it "looks like he didn't win" 62 days after the November 3 presidential election.
Farah predicted Trump has little intention of avoiding attention during the four years of Biden's administration, warning against any hopes he'll simply disappear and "go off into the sunset" before 2024.
"[Trump will] loom large over the Republican Party," Farah told the AP in an interview published Monday about the challenges faced by any anti-Trump GOP lawmakers across the country.
"He's got the most energetic base in modern political history," Farah continued. "What the party is going to face is the reality that the president, even though it looks like he didn't win, got more votes than a [Mitt] Romney, than a [John] McCain, than any Republican candidate in history. And we can't discount the voices of those 70 million Americans."
Farah's remarks come amid criticism from several GOP senators including 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney that the president should concede defeat to Biden. Romney, the lone member of his party to cast a vote in favor of convicting the president during impeachment last year, told SiriusXM that Trump holds "enormous influence" over the GOP. The Utah senator predicted Trump's influence will wane greatly over his next four years outside the White House.
Romney said regardless of whether Trump is the 2024 frontrunner, "those that are circling the 2024 race...are headed in the same, more populist-oriented direction."
"I think the Republican Party today is the party of President Trump, and so his positions are the positions of the Republican voters," Romney added.
An end-of-year roundup of 2020 polls recently revealed that Trump currently has the support of about 90 percent of Republican voters. The president's massive popularity puts him in a unique position-even as the loser of the 2020 race-to maintain control of the GOP's political narrative.
One major factor in Trump's political influence, his Twitter account, could become jeopardized after he leaves office and risks having his account shut down by the social media giant he frequently criticizes as "biased." Currently, as president, his tweets are protected under Twitter's definition of "world leaders." The platform's guidelines state that some tweets from both his POTUS and personal @realdonaldtrump accounts have "clear public interest value" which oblige them to be left up through the end of his term.
Newsweek reached out to the White House for additional remarks Monday afternoon.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Benjamin Fearnow is a reporter based out of Newsweek's New York City offices. He was previously at CBS and Mediaite ... Read more
