Hope Hicks Tapped As Interim White House Communications Director: Report

Nancy Tartaglione
Updated
0

The day after a Donald Trump press conference flew wildly off the rails in New York, the President is getting a new White House Communications Director — temporarily. Hope Hicks, who started as an agency publicist working on Ivanka Trump’s fashion line in 2012, and rose to become White House Director of Strategic Communications, has been tapped for the post in an interim capacity.

The 28-year-old former press secretary for Trump’s presidential campaign will, for the time being, replace Anthony Scaramucci, who had the job for 10 days last month. Fox News cited a senior White House source saying Hicks will fill the role until a permanent replacement can be found.

There has been no official word from the White House, and Trump this morning has been focused on tweeting support for Luther Strange, praise for Kim Jong-un’s “wise” decision not to bomb Guam, slamming Amazon, and retweeting Fox News on his “infrastructure” presser yesterday.

Hicks is a longtime aide to Trump and a trusted staffer who was on the campaign trail with him. She has been on the WH press team as Director of Strategic Communications but has recently kept a low public profile — her Twitter account, opened in March this year, contains three re-tweets.

She did make headlines back in May when, in a statement to the Washington Post, she defended Trump’s penchant for teasing members of his staff, describing POTUS as “magnetic” and someone who “exudes positive energy” with “a great sense of humor… and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.”

WaPo likened the statement to the stuff of an SNL parody.

A former model and face of Gossip Girl‘s spinoff book series, The It Girl, she once read for an acting role with Alec Baldwin. Ironically, the Daily Mail reports that Baldwin helped Hicks get an interview at Hiltzik Strategies which was her first PR job.

During the campaign, the New York Times called Hicks “arguably the least credentialed press secretary in the modern history of presidential politics.” Today, the paper notes that she has “the most sway over who in the news media gets interviews with the president” and will hold a post whose main function is to set a clear and direct message from the White House each day.

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