Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said former President Donald Trump knows that “he’s lying” but continues anyway because “people will believe it.”

Grisham pushed back on a question from CNN host Jim Acosta asking if Trump “thinks what he’s saying is true,” adding that he is “a very smart man” and understands what he is doing, while speaking on CNN Newsroom on Sunday.

“Well, he’s not a crackpot. He’s actually a very smart man,” Grisham said. “I mean, he was president of the United States, so we have to give him a modicum of credit for that. But no, he knows he’s lying.”

She also said that while she was press secretary for Trump, from 2019 to 2020, he would tell her to say information she claimed was false, saying he claimed that people would believe it regardless.

“He used to tell me when I was press secretary, go out there and say this, and if it was false, he would say, ‘It doesn’t matter, Stephanie. Just say it over and over and over again. People will believe it,’” Grisham said.

Grisham predicted Trump’s conduct would lead him to the Republican nomination but that it would hurt him in the general election.

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“He knows his base believes in him. He knows he can basically say anything, and his base will believe what he’s saying now,” she said. “I think this will help propel him into the general. But I think that independents and, you know, center-leaning Republicans are not going to be buying this. They’re much, much smarter than that. And so I think that he’s going to get in trouble in the general with this kind of — these kind of lies.”

Grisham resigned from the Trump administration following the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Since leaving the White House, she has been a vocal critic of the former president’s conduct.