Hope Hicks has made history as the youngest person to ever work as White House communications director. Now that she's freed herself from babysitting duties at the White House, Olivia Nuzzi of New York wrote a lengthy profile of the West Wing beauty that was both dense in tantalizing gossip and revealing of just how dull she is. And, like all honorable coverage of the White House, we got an even deeper sense of just how dysfunctional this administration is. Here were the most critical takeaways:
Hicks has been a prime target of a what appears to be a shady, bespoke paparazzi-for-hire/oppo research firm since her arrival in D.C.
"They were unaware that they were not alone. Throughout the course of the evening, their every movement was being watched: Outside Hicks’s apartment, at Gidley’s home, outside the restaurant, walking into the lobby of her apartment building. Each moment was documented in photos and video, even through the window in the back of the cab home. Hicks was being tailed by a group called Probe-Media, “an elite agency” that “deals in exclusive material and provides images and video footage and reconnaissance in a service uniquely tailored to meet our clients’ needs,” according to the company’s sparse website."
She has a tragically ironic choice of favorite emoji.
"One of the only cases of Hicks speaking on the record was in an interview for the Forbes “30 Under 30” list, in which she said her favorite song was “Friends in Low Places” and her favorite emoji the “see-no-evil” monkey."
Trump is a girl's guy...
“He doesn’t trust any men and never has. He doesn’t like men, you see. He has no male friends.”
I don't want to live in a world where Trump is a girl's guy. I can't. Take me from this mortal plane.
...But only under certain, predictable circumstances...
An anonymous source tells Nuzzi:
“'Trump’s main problem with other people is he sees them as competition, and he doesn’t see Hope that way, because she’s not.' The source went on, 'This is why he’s fired all these people. This is why he hated Bannon, the problem with Scaramucci. They were seeking to eclipse him and he can’t handle that.'”
Ivanka keeps an "ironic distance" from her father, and seems to be counting down the days until DJT kicks it.
“Ivanka refers to him as ‘DJT’ just like the boys do, and Ivanka understands that her father is gonna be dead in ten years.”
Understanding the inevitability of death is definitely a marker of maturity, but counting down the days until it happens feels a tad too Days of Our Lives. This statement also suggests that someone's value contingent on their longevity, which feels maniacally calculated enough to be something Ivanka ascribes to.
Hope is a walking Pinterest board.
“Each cookie package included a note she’d written in silver marker. “Believe in love,” read one message. Underneath, she’d drawn a small heart.”
Like the picture sharing platform I've likened her too, Hicks looks enchanting enough, and you can waste your time thinking there's greater artistic meaning there, but it's ultimately she's an amateur looking to play dress up as a professional.
But John Kelly, whether right about Hicks or not, is a real dickbag.
“He was extraordinarily dismissive of [Hicks]. He would refer to her as ‘the high-schooler,’ he would joke about how she was inexperienced, she was in over her head, she was immature,” a former senior White House official told me. “He doesn’t like a woman that potentially has some position of power over him. He thinks women should be subservient to him. If you look at his relationship with Ivanka or Hope — women who aren’t subservient to him — he has problems with those people.”
There’s a Tommy Boy fan club in the White House.
“[Deputy Press Secretary Hogan] Gidley and Hicks shared a love of Tommy Boy and mint candies, and they became fast friends.”
This haphazard detail is much more fitting upon remembering the plot of Tommy Boy—through nepotism a dumb man lands himself at the top of an auto company and is surrounded by scheming con artists looking to cash in on his idiocy.
