The Republican Party has long been lacking courage. But profiles in it can still be found among the scores of Trump administration staffers who have come out against their former boss, at potentially immense personal cost. One among them: Sarah Matthews, who served as Donald Trump’s deputy press secretary until January 6. On the latest episode of Inside the Hive, Matthews opens up about the “cognitive dissonance” she experienced as a spokesperson for Trump, recalls how the Capitol riot became her breaking point, and unpacks why she has thrown her support behind Kamala Harris’s campaign, even if doing so puts a “target” on her back. “Donald Trump is so much bigger than just me,” she says. “The guilt that I would feel” from sitting on the sidelines, Matthews adds, “would have been much greater than the fear that I might feel right now.”
Matthews, a lifelong conservative, remembers that early into her White House stint she began to have reservations. “I was never a die-hard Trumper, I was never a MAGA type of person, but I was one of those Republicans who thought, Well, at least he’s better than Hillary. And obviously I think that it’s hard to maintain that kind of cognitive dissonance,” she says. “At a certain point you kind of start to drink the Kool-Aid, and you start to be okay with maybe overlooking some of the red flags. And there were definitely moments where I was working for him—and especially being a spokesperson for him—where I defended things that I’m not necessarily proud of and that I kind of looked the other way.”
Ultimately, her breaking point was witnessing the former president’s reaction to January 6, as a riotous throng of Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol. “He did not want to lift a finger to call off the mob because he was enjoying what he was seeing. And so it was then that I lost all faith in him,” Matthews recalls. “He wasn’t disturbed by the violence. I thought this was one of the most horrific things that I had ever witnessed.”
She quit on the spot.
After that, Matthews resumed a less chaotic life in Republican politics, but realized she had a higher calling when over a year later she agreed to testify to the January 6 committee about her experiences. Still, it wasn’t a decision she made lightly. “I knew that then I needed to do everything I could to try to help the Harris campaign,” she says, “to spread the message, to help create this permission structure for disaffected Republicans like myself, that, look, we need to leave Donald Trump behind and turn the page on him.”
In July 2022, Matthews officially joined the likes of Cassidy Hutchinson—another former member of Trump’s White House—on the congressional witness stand, testifying about what she saw on January 6. But that didn’t come without cost; she’s potentially sacrificed a career in GOP politics forever, suffered endless online harassment, and may have put a “target” on her back in the event of a Trump win. “I’m sure that there’s a list and I might be on it somewhere,” she admits, “but that’s why I think it’s so important for me to be out there spreading this message of saying, ‘Look, I used to support this guy. I used to work for this guy as a spokesperson and he is no longer the same candidate that he was in 2016 and 2020. He’s become even more radicalized because he’s not running on making America great again. He’s not running on solving problems for everyday Americans; he’s running on retribution and that is what a second Trump term will look like.’”
