White House communications director Alyssa Farah resigned from her post today after 3½ years in the Trump administration.
The Washington Post: Farah, 31, began her White House tenure as press secretary under Vice President Pence before joining the Defense Department as press secretary last September, and she returned to the White House as communications director in April.
Farah’s departure, with little over a month remaining in President Trump’s administration, amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that — despite his baseless and dangerous claims to the contrary — Trump lost the 2020 election, and much of his team is now pondering their post-White House future.
On the Saturday after the election, when the presidency was widely called for Joe Biden, Farah offered a call to unity on Twitter, writing, “There is more that unites as a Nation than divides us,” along with three American flag emoji.
In her resignation letter, which she delivered today, Farah called her time in the administration “the honor of a lifetime” and described herself as “deeply proud of the incredible things we were able to accomplish to make our country stronger, safer, and more secure.”
“Under this Administration, the ISIS caliphate was destroyed, American hostages were returned home, NATO is stronger than ever, we’ve brokered historic Middle East peace deals, and I was on the ground in Kabul for the announcement of a historic peace deal between the Afghan Government and the Taliban aimed at ending America’s longest war,” Farah wrote.
Farah’s last day is on Friday, and she plans to start a consulting firm focusing on the corporate, political and defense realms.
Farah largely played a behind-the-scenes role in the White House, earning a reputation as a hard-working professional who generally had a strong relationship with the White House press corps.
Her return to the White House as communications director after her time at the Defense Department coincided with Mark Meadows’s tenure as chief of staff.
Farah had a long-standing relationship with Meadows from five years she spent on Capitol Hill, first as Meadows’s communications director and later as the spokeswoman for the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
A senior administration official told NBC News that presidential personnel director John McEntee, who formerly served as the president’s personal aide, has communicated to departments that they should terminate any political appointees looking for new work while Trump refuses to concede and disputes the results of last week’s election.
McEntee, a former college quarterback who was hustled out of the White House two years ago after a security clearance check turned up a prolific habit for online gambling, has engineered a post-election purge for Trump.