What To Know
- Alyssa Farah Griffin blamed midterm losses in part on Trump’s aggressive immigration policies.
- She argued that Republicans mistook public support for approval of extreme tactics.
The day after a blue tsunami swept across the United States in the midterm elections, The View cohost and former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin weighed in on the Republican Party’s crushing defeat, pointing to President Donald Trump‘s aggressive immigration policies and controversial ICE enforcement tactics as one of the reasons even longtime conservative voters had turned against his administration.
On the Behind the Table podcast with producer Brian Teta, Griffin, who has been an outspoken critic of her former boss, argued that the administration had taken its immigration agenda too far, mistaking Americans’ desire for a secure border for support for increasingly extreme enforcement measures.
“When you see deep ruby red pockets of the country rejecting this presidency, it’s because of policies he chose to put in place, which are not traditionally Republican policies. And then I would add the ICE enforcement,” explained Griffin. “I did not grow up in a Republican party where we basically betrayed immigrants, and we wanted them out of this country, and we hated the ones who were here illegally.”
“That is not what George Bush stood for. That’s not what John McCain stood for. That’s not what Mitt Romney stood on,” explained Griffin. “They overreached, and they thought that this sort of casual, frankly, racism that permeates a lot of this administration was how a lot of the country feels. And we don’t. And we sent a message. We wanted the border secured. We do not want to see the ICE enforcement that we’ve seen.”
“And one of the most striking images that I saw from last night, I forgot to pull it up on the show, was people putting their ‘I voted’ stickers at the spot where Alex Pretti was killed and at the spot where Renée Good was and others. It was literally saying they are not here to vote, but we are voting for you and for what your death represented,” said Griffin.
Griffin went on to state, “Politicians take this idea of ‘I was elected,’ and then they want to go to the most extreme version of what that could mean. And this is Donald Trump’s legacy now. There’s no coming back from this.”
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