Interim Communications Director at the White House, Hope Hicks will now be taking on the role permanently.

Nearly a month ago, the White House confirmed that the long-time Trump staffer who was erstwhile unfamiliar to most would be working as Communication Director until a permanent replacement was announced.

WH makes it official: Hope Hicks is Interim White House Communications Director. Permanent director to be named "at appropriate time" pic.twitter.com/TFq3MGKm6K

— Michael C. Bender (@MichaelCBender) August 16, 2017

The Communications Director position was held by Anthony Scaramucci for 10 days before an ouster that saw him kicked out of the White House following a New Yorker interview that went wrong.

To fill the gap, President Trump has picked one of his youngest, longest-serving and extremely loyal media aides, Hope Hicks who up until the interim role served as the director of strategic communications in the White House.

Hope Hicks is not new to the Trump family. Before her stint as press secretary for the Trump campaign, Hicks worked with Ivanka Trump’s fashion line after the PR firm she worked for assigned her to Trump organisation accounts. In 2014, she got Donald Trump’s attention and as she said in an interview with New York Magazine, “Mr. Trump looked at me and said, ‘I’m thinking about running for president, and you’re going to be my press secretary'”.

With zero political experience but a family background in Public Relations, Hicks became Trump’s media handler. GQ wrote of her, “It was her job to facilitate Trump’s rebuke of the Pope …it was she who helped malign a female reporter who’d been manhandled by Trump’s campaign manager, immediately claiming she was a lying attention hound…” According to the magazine,  her father, Paul B. Hicks, his own father and her maternal grandfather all worked in PR while “her mother worked as a legislative aide for a Democrat”.

Hopester, as President Trump likes to call her, modeled for Ralph Lauren at the age of 11 and is a friend of Ivanka and Jared Kushner. GQ called her, “a hugger and a people pleaser, with long brown hair and green eyes, a young woman of distinctly all-American flavor”.

Hicks, unlike many of Trump’s media staff, is averse to social media and up until this new role had no direct dealings with the press or any reason to be in front of cameras.

Tolu

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