The former White House press secretary turned chief of staff for former first lady Melania Trump has said Donald Trump knows he is lying to his loyal base.

Stephanie Grisham was asked plainly by CNN’s Jim Acosta if the former president knows he is “lying” when he peddles baseless conspiracies to his base.

A recent survey had found that 34 per cent of Republicans believe the January 6 insurrection was organised by the FBI, not Trump’s own supporters.

This is despite the fact hundreds of people have been charged and face consequences for their involvement in the assault of the Capitol after Trump lost the 2020 election.

“Based on your experience when he peddles this stuff, does he know he’s lying?” Acosta asked Grisham.

“Does he convince himself that the lie is true? Is he just kind of a crackpot who believes in conspiracy theories? And so he thinks what he’s saying is true. Which is it? Do you know what it is?”

Grisham said that Trump was by no means a “crackpot”, but instead is a “very smart man”.

“I mean, he was president of the United States. We have to give him a modicum of credit for that,” she said in response.

“But no, he knows he’s lying. 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’.”

Stephanie Grisham says she knows Donald Trump is lying to his base.

Grisham was the White House press secretary from 2019 until April 2020, where she was loyal to Trump.

She then became Melania Trump’s chief of staff in 2020.

But she resigned in the aftermath of January 6.

“He knows his base believes in him. He knows he can basically say anything and his base will believe what he’s saying,” Grisham continued on CNN.

When pressed about whether he knows he is lying when he speaks about the FBI and Antifa, Grisham was certain of it.

“I know he knows he’s lying,” she asserted.

“I mean, I was with him nonstop for six years. He knows all he has to do is continue to say a thing and people will believe it.”

Bleak prediction for Donald Trump’s run

Despite support from his base, Grisham doesn’t believe the lies Donald Trump spouts will get him far in this year’s US presidential election.

His lies will likely “propel” him to the general election, where he will face off with Democrat Joe Biden, but she doesn’t think it will be enough for him to win.

“I think that independents and, you know, centre-leaning Republicans are not going to be buying this,” Grisham told Acosta.

“They’re much, much smarter than that and so I think that he’s going to get in trouble in the general [election] with these kinds of lies.”

The Supreme Court is yet to decide whether Trump will be on the ballot in the 2024 election, due to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

At issue is the Colorado Supreme Court’s December 19 ruling disqualifying Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot based on language in the US constitution’s 14th amendment for engaging in insurrection, involving the January 6, 2021 attack by his supporters on the US Capitol.

Regardless of what happens, Grisham urged people to think about what another Trump presidency might be like should he succeed.

“It’s important for people who were like me or who are like me now, who really believe in him, to understand how another Trump presidency will be,” Grisham said.

“So what is democracy? That’s people having the freedom to act and speak freely. I think under Trump, you’re not going to be able to do that, or you are going to be able to do that as long as you’re talking about him just in positive ways.”