Hope Hicks is trending today, which is unsurprising given that it has been reported that she tested positive for Coronavirus days beforeDonald Trump and the First Lady Melania Trump. The inference being that she passed the virus on to them.
If her name wasn't familar to you before today, Hope Hicks has been a close part of Trump's team for several years now. After working on his presidential campaign, she was made Trump's communication director in August 2017 - a role she held until February 2018. She returned to the White House in March 2020 as an aide to Jared Kushner and counselor to Donald Trump. According to a profile in the New York Times, Hope wasn’t asked to join Trump’s presidential campaign. No, no. ‘Mr Trump sat her down and said “This is your new job”’, Hope’s mum said. Not that Hope had any political experience before, of course. But that doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite for the Trump administration I suppose...
But perhaps more interestingly (confusingly) prior to finding herself as the woman transcribing Trump’s tweets (yep, he’d speak them, she’d tweets them, apparently), Hopie, as Trump reportedly likes to call her, used to be a model. She was a teen Ford model and had featured in ad campaigns for Ralph Lauren.
Beyond that, you may have also spotted Hope's face on the cover of 'The It Girl', a novel by Cecily von Ziegesar who wrote the Gossip Girl books we all grew to love. On the cover, she's clutching a pair of heels looking all doe-eyed into the distance in a Serena Vanderwoodson kind of way.
So how did she get from the cover of a Gossip Girl spin off novel to one of the most powerful women in the White House? Well, Hope apparently worked as a rep for Hiltzik Strategies, a PR company in New York where she met Ivanka Trump. When she started working on Ivanka’s fashion line they became pals and the rest, it seems, is a rather warped democratic history.
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