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Trump appoints new spokesperson who vows to ‘stand for the truth’ despite supporting the ‘big lie’

Harrington previously backed false claim that Biden wouldn’t be sworn in as president

John Bowden
Tuesday 15 June 2021 15:56 EDT
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President Trump speaks in Greenville, North Carolina.
President Trump speaks in Greenville, North Carolina. (Getty Images)

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Former President Donald Trump announced the appointment of a new spokesperson, former Republican Party national spokeswoman Liz Harrington, on Tuesday following the resignation of former aide Jason Miller.

In a press release on Tuesday, the former president called Ms Harrington a “fighter” and instrumental to his 2020 campaign for reelection.

Ms Harrington previously made national headlines in the days following the presidential election in November when she claimed that President Biden would not be inaugurated on 20 January despite Mr Biden having been projected the winner a day earlier.

Speaking in interviews with several local news outlets, Ms Harrington repeatedly claimed that Mr Biden had in fact lost the election, and argued that a media narrative was attempting to “coronate” Mr Biden as president. She also echoed the baseless fraud claims about votes in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that other associates of Mr Trump also spread in the weeks after the election ended.

“This complete fraud of pretending that Joe Biden is the president elect: He is not. We won. We won,” she said in one interview with Kentucky radio station KFYO in November.

Ms Harrington continued to spread her false claims about the election even after the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 Jan, after which five people died including one US Capitol Police officer; two other officers died from suicide in the weeks following.

“The real insurrection…happened on November 4th at about 3:30 in the morning, when all those vote dumps were dropped,” she said during a 12 January interview with the far-right cable channel Newsmax, referring to baseless and unproven claims that votes for Mr Biden were shipped in to election facilities overnight.

“That’s when it happened. That was the overthrow,” continued Harrington.

In her own statement on Tuesday Ms Harrington called her new position the “honor of a lifetime” while not referencing either her or Mr Trump’s false claims about the election.

“It is an honor of a lifetime to represent President Trump and to stand for the truth,” Harrington said in the announcement. “At such a critical time for our country, President Trump’s fighting spirit is needed now more than ever. We will not stand idly by and let America fall to the Radical Left-Wing Mob.”

Her appointment comes as it has been reported by numerous outlets and journalists including The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman that Mr Trump has told supporters in gatherings at his Mar-a-Lago resort that he could be reinstated as president, despite there being no mechanism in the US Constitution for such an action to occur.

The former president has also teased his interest in a 2024 bid for the White House, a prospect that would almost certainly make Mr Trump the frontrunner for the next GOP presidential nomination.

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