The Mystifying Triumph of Hope Hicks, Donald Trump’s Right-Hand Woman

[don-o]

The Mystifying Triumph of Hope Hicks, Donald Trump’s Right-Hand Woman

By Olivia Nuzzi  June 20, 2016, 5:00 am ET

http://www.gq.com/story/hope-hicks-mystifying-triumph-donald-trump

One day you’re just a smiley PR lackey; the next, you’re a major operative in the nuttiest campaign in decades. Such is the strange year in the life of Hope Hicks, the 27-year-old accidental press secretary for Donald Trump. How did she get here? And how much longer can she last?

From the antechamber to Donald Trump's office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, I was fetched by Hope Hicks. She was apologetic for the wait and a little nervous about what I'd come to discuss—namely, her.

The 27-year-old press secretary was clad in a teal dress, and she dug her stilettos into the colorless carpet as she showed me into the office, a room festooned with enough Trump memorabilia to suggest a serial killer's shrine. There before me sat Trump himself, behind his giant desk, upon which there was nothing resembling a computer, a PalmPilot, or even an Etch A Sketch.

“Oh,” Trump said, flashing his notorious disdain for handshakes as I extended my arm. He stood and reached, Martian-like, for my hand, as if the ritual were not the habit of businessmen or politicians. Hicks, meanwhile, settled into a $5,000 red velvet Knoll lounge chair. She affixed a smile to her face, and then said nothing more to me. As if speaking were not the habit of a spokesperson. But then, Hicks—who never appears on TV and rarely talks to reporters—resembles a traditional political spokesperson about as much as Trump resembles Mister Rogers.

Hicks is a product not of Washington but of the Trump Organization, a marble-walled universe where one's delightful agreeability and ferocious loyalty are worth more than conventional experience. She is a hugger and a people pleaser, with long brown hair and green eyes, a young woman of distinctly all-American flavor—the sort that inspires Tom Petty songs, not riots. And yet Hicks has, almost by accident, helped architect the strangest and least polite campaign in modern American history.

I wanted Hicks to help me understand just how all this had come to pass, how a person who'd never worked in politics had nonetheless become the most improbably important operative in this election. But she declined my request to talk. Instead, she arranged something more surreal: I could talk about her with Donald Trump, in front of her.

exc

[sinkspur]

.
A 42-year-old operative who'd worked for the Tea Party group Americans for Prosperity, Lewandowski was now the campaign manager. Hicks was told she couldn't work for both the political and corporate branches of the Trump team. She had to choose: Join the campaign or go back to the kids' floor of Trump Tower. Hicks, who hates to disappoint, nonetheless told Lewandowski he'd have to find a new press secretary, which apparently set him off. “He made her cry a bunch of times,” Nunberg said. In Nunberg's telling, Lewandowski said to Hicks, “You made a big bleep mistake; you're bleep dead to me.” Lewandowski declined to either confirm or correct Nunberg's recollection. “I don't recall the specifics of that,” he told me. “I can say definitively that I don't recall the specific incident that you're referring to.

Isn't Corey cool?

Anyway,  Olivia Nuzzi is a fantastic writer with a huge vocabulary and a unique expression.  Good article.

[sinkspur]

Outside the campaign, Hicks's colleagues gossip about whether she'll regret her heady first brush with politics. “She made a choice to work for the most fascist candidate in recent American history,” one political spokesperson told me. “Everyone who knows her tells her to stop doing this and putting her name on stuff.… She is going to regret everything she's said and done. And I don't think she knows it yet.”

She'll be lumped in with Roger Stone and have the same reputation.

[ABX]

There have been several incidents where Hicks and Corey were seen in public shouting matches right on the streets of New York in recent months. Oil and water those two.

[sinkspur]

Hicks won.

[r9etb]

It's really not that mystifying:


The Donald "has a type," as they say....

[uglybiker]

Hope Hicks

As opposed to...

A Hick from Hope.

[geronl]

Of course Trump chose his new girlfriend over Corey.

duh

[geronl]

So... why is Trump giving an interview about his new GF to the magazine that published nude pics of his wife anyways