Hope Hicks Is Incredibly Good at Keeping Her Secrets to Herself
Hope Hicks, White House cipher, appeared in New York magazine Monday in a story by Olivia Nuzzi called “What Hope Hicks Learned at the White House.” I read the whole thing, and it took awhile. It was 7,000 words and dense with twists and turns and whodunits and palace intrigue and bad actors. But what did I learn about what Hope Hicks learned from the White House? Not a lot. Hicks is that good, as a P.R. professional who knows never to make herself the story and especially as a soon-to-be-former employee of the leakiest White House in recent memory. I did learn a lot about White House dynamics, however, and you can, too.
Nuzzi spent an undisclosed amount of time over the past few weeks with the famously press-shy former-communications director, in a safe, off-the-record space. So some of the most specific details about her are from a Forbes 30 Under 30 interview from before Trump’s inauguration, one of the only ones she’s ever given. What her voice sounds like, for one, is surprising, and there’s also the little detail about her favorite emoji. It’s the “see no evil” monkey. Dark! Her friend, White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley, and Hicks’s replacement, Mercedes “Mercy” Schlapp, agreed that if the gang were in Saved by the Bell, “Hicks would be Kelly Kapowski.” (For the uninitiated, Kelly Kapowski’s defining characteristic was being the hot one.)
She gets up at 4:00 A.M. and goes to a trainer before work, and still she has time for baking and crafts. She made cookies for staffers for Valentine’s Day and wrote tags on them in a silver paint-pen that read, “Believe in Love.” She has Trump’s trust, even now that she intends to leave the White House at some undetermined point this spring. Kellyanne Conway said he’d often ask her opinion, and she was expected to be the other half of his brain, answering the question, “Do we like him?” about whomever he’s about to speak to—congressperson to journalist or what have you. Nuzzi’s sources suggest that he seemed to especially like her completely unthreatening lack of political ambition. She wrote a pro/con list about when to leave her post, and realized quickly there was no good time to leave because whenever she chose to leave, her exit would be tied to whatever is the crisis of the moment. The portrait it paints is of a type-A connected woman whose ability to read her boss has been her biggest asset.
And this is about as much as someone even as sourced up as Nuzzi can learn about a woman who has been connected to two of the Trump campaign and administration’s biggest scandals, thanks to her alleged relationships with Corey Lewandowski and then Rob Porter, whose two ex-wives had reported physical and mental abuse to the F.B.I. when they were first evaluating him for a security clearance (Porter has denied all the allegations against him). There’s plenty of detail about that in Nuzzi’s story, but don’t ever expect to hear Hicks’s side of things. Unlike Omarosa Manigault Newman and Sean Spicer, Hicks is one soon-to-be ex-Trump staffer with no interest in a tell-all. “Hope’s never gonna write the memoir,” one source told Nuzzi. “She has no political aspirations. She doesn’t particularly like politics. She’s loyal to Mr. Trump.”
For now, knowing her favorite emoji is the closest we’re going to get.
