Trump press aide praises Cheney and urges GOP to stop peddling ex-president’s election lies

Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah told CNN that continuing to focus on the 2020 election and ousting House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney for refusing to stop pushing back on former president Donald Trump’s election lies is “strategically unwise”.

“When you lose an election, the last thing you should do is look back on the election and repeatedly relitigate it. The last thing we should be talking about is the election the Republicans lost. We should be focusing on the midterms and what the Republican Party is for,” Ms Farah told CNN on Wednesday.

CNN host John Berman said Ms Farah left the Trump White House in December because she was concerned that Mr Trump was “misleading the public about the election,” and that she was worried that the lies might lead to violence, as later seen during the Capitol riot on 6 January.

“How many actual Americans even know what House Republican Conference Chair is?” Ms Farah asked. “This is a Washington fight internally on Capitol Hill that has no bearing on the American public and it’s a shame.”

She said the fight over Ms Cheney’s future is not what the caucus “needs to be voting on” and argued that it would make the midterms “a bigger challenge” for Republicans.

Ms Farah posited that the Republicans are not going to win back the House by winning the districts of conservative firebrands and Trump loyalists like Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia or Matt Gaetz in Florida.

She instead urged the GOP to focus on winning moderate districts where the Democrats are a point or two ahead. “They don’t do that by carrying on the myth that the election was stolen,” she said.