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.
From GQ, read it HERE
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