15
Trump eventually replaced Scaramucci with Hope Hicks, who had handled public relations since the beginning of the campaign. With an office ten feet from the Oval Office, better than any other staffer, Hicks understands Trump and how he wants to communicate.
“Hope is the gatekeeper in chief,” Spicer says. “She knows him probably better than anybody in terms of the staff, and she will fight for him on every issue.”
Hicks’s decisions were often spur of the moment.
“Whether she granted an interview with Trump just depended on who you are and what the moment was,” Spicer says. “If it was like a good day, she’d say, ‘We’ve had five calls for interviews. Here are two that I think you should do.’ But on another day, the same reporter could call, and it could go to a black hole, too.”
A native of Greenwich, Connecticut, Hicks is the daughter of Paul B. Hicks III, the National Football League’s former executive vice president of communications who was Roger Goodell’s right-hand man.
A stunning former model, Hicks graduated from Southern Methodist University in 2010. Her connection to the Trumps began two years later, when she joined New York public relations powerhouse Hiltzik Strategies and began working on accounts related to Trump’s real estate, hospitality, and fashion ventures. In August 2014, she joined the Trump Organization, working for Ivanka Trump, helping expand her fashion label and modeling for her online store.
Five months later, Trump made Hicks, who was twenty-six years old, his press secretary. In January 2015, while planning for his potential presidential run, Trump summoned Hicks to his office.
“Mr. Trump looked at me and said, ‘I’m thinking about running for president, and you’re going to be my press secretary,’ ” she says.
Initially Hicks was the White House director of strategic communications. After Trump fired Scaramucci, she became interim communications director. In September 2017, Trump named her communications director.
Trump calls Hicks the Hopester; she calls him Mr. Trump. She never appears on TV and has given only a few short interviews over the years.
Hicks issued her personal description of him after Trump, in a news conference at Trump Tower shortly after he won the White House, announced that he would be putting his companies into a trust that his two older sons would run during his presidency.
“I hope at the end of eight years, I’ll come back and say, ‘Oh, you did a good job,’ ” Trump said, as his sons looked on. But he couldn’t resist a final tweak—half joke, half warning: “Otherwise, if they do a bad job, I’ll say, ‘You’re fired.’ ”
Hicks noted that Trump was simply joking.
“President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him,” Hicks said. “He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of thirty thousand. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant 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.”
Trump has told friends that billionaires are constantly asking him to fix them up with Hicks, who is consumed by her work and until recently was never seen with a date. Trump says he refuses.
Hicks is known as a Trump whisperer, letting aides know when it is a good time to speak to the president.
“She can help give readouts on conversations the president has had with legislators,” says Marc Short, Trump’s director of legislative affairs. “If there’s something that’s happening in urgent fashion, she’s able to convey that information quickly to the president and get back with the answer that we need.”
In letting aides know Trump’s moods, Hicks performs the same function as did longtime Trump aide Norma Foerderer and her successor, Rhona Graff, a senior vice president of the Trump Organization who had worked for Trump for thirty years by the time he became president.
Everyone who knew Trump knew that Norma Foerderer was his right hand. When Jay Leno wanted to invite Trump on his show, he called Foerderer. When Jack Nicholson tried to call Trump, he went through Norma first so she could verify that he was who he claimed to be.
Before joining Trump in February 1981, Foerderer had been a junior State Department political officer based in Africa. She then joined a nonprofit, which she quit abruptly after her boss yelled at her for not catching a typo.
Out of a job, she saw a classified ad in the New York Times for a secretary. It turned out that the ad had been placed by Ivana Trump, who first interviewed her. After Foerderer passed that test, Donald interviewed her one Saturday morning.
“There was Donald, in the office, perched on the reception desk…with his coat slung over his shoulder in a cape fashion and wearing a tie,” Foerderer recalled. “And so there he was, swinging his leg. I arrived on the stroke of nine. He said, ‘I’m glad to see you’re on time.’ Punctuality has always been a big thing with him. And I said, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
After interviewing her for two minutes, Trump hired her and gave her a raise after three weeks. Foerderer thought Ivana, who dubbed her husband “the Donald,” was more interested in Donald’s hiring a secretary than he was. In fact, Foerderer found that Trump had no files. He kept everything in his head. His lawyer kept copies of contracts.
“Donald is such a man of vision,” Foerderer said. “He allows you to do whatever you want. Soon, I was doing all the purchasing. I did all the human resources. I screened his mail, I looked for special projects, did the preliminary research on them, and then would give him the results so other staff members could investigate further. I arranged special events and press conferences, I did his PR. It was the kind of job that just grew because I was there and available.”
Somehow, Foerderer said, “Donald instills in you the desire to do more and more and more, and you want to please him. And yet he rarely criticizes. I mean he would if you did something stupid. He allows you to expand, if you come in with an idea, he’ll say, ‘Fine, run with it, and see what you do.’ This motivates and challenges you even more, and you want to please him because you admire him so much.”
Foerderer often sat in on meetings with lawyers or architects who were amazed at the ideas Trump came up with.
“Everybody stands around like dummies, because they didn’t realize this could be done,” she said.
Trump would say, “Norma’s a good negotiator.”
“Well,” she said, “I learned from the master. I got him really wonderful deals for commercials. What did I do? I would sit tight and say, ‘I want a million.’ They’d say, ‘Start lower.’ My response would be, ‘Look, you’re getting Donald Trump, and there’s only one of him. I can’t recommend a lower price for him. You’re getting a bargain.’ I’d just talk and talk and talk, and joke with them. And before you know it, bingo. I’d be just as surprised as anybody else that it happened. But I just knew that I had to persevere the way he does.”
Above all, Trump demanded candor from his executives, Foerderer said.
“I was good with him because I was completely honest with him,” Foerderer said. “I’m not a sycophant in any way. I thought Donald was a tremendous man, and I admire him enormously, but there was no way I was going to let him believe I agreed with him when I did not. If I disagreed with something, I would be the first to say to him, ‘Donald, I don’t think so.’ ”
Foerderer made an appearance on Trump’s show The Apprentice, recommending against finalist Amy Henry, who was quickly fired in favor of Bill Rancic. Before Trump would fly to Mar-a-Lago, Foerderer would let butler Tony Senecal know the arrival time and any special requests the boss had.
One day, Foerderer warned Senecal that Trump was “in a mood like a bear with a sore ass.” She said Trump had just read a National Enquirer article reporting that a police officer had caught his then-wife Marla Maples having sex with her bodyguard Spencer Wagner on the beach near Mar-a-Lago at 4 a.m. on April 16, 1996.
The officer had spotted Wagner’s car parked illegally. He found Wagner, thirty-four years old, hiding under a lifeguard stand on the beach. Wagner claimed he was there alone until Maples, then thirty-three, emerged from underneath the stand wearing tight, black spandex leggings and a skimpy jogging top. The officer issued a parking ticket and told the pair to move along.
After the heads-up from Foerderer, Senecal bought all 127 copies of the National Enquirer with the article reporting the encounter from Main Street News, then Palm Beach’s only newsstand. After giving the manager twenty dollars to keep quiet, Senecal stashed the papers in the trunk of his car.
The next morning, Trump saw him reading a newspaper in the pantry.
“What are you reading?” Trump asked
“The Shiny Sheet,” Senecal said, using the local moniker for the Palm Beach Daily News. “I already read the National Enquirer,” Senecal told the boss. Then the butler told him about the 127 copies of the paper stashed in his car trunk.
The Palm Beach social arbiter, the Palm Beach Daily News is known as “the Shiny Sheet” or simply “the Shiny” because it is printed on smudgeproof high-quality paper, supposedly in deference to the Palm Beach socialites who don’t want to get their hands dirty. The paper runs pages of photos, taken at balls and private parties, often of couples grimacing through extreme plastic surgery jobs.
No news is too trivial to escape the Shiny Sheet’s notice. “Unlocked bike stolen from Publix,” one headline said. The story reported that a midnight-blue bike had been stolen from the supermarket’s parking lot. The story noted that only one of the bike’s twelve gears was working.
Although the paper doesn’t print everything it knows, it understands the readership. One day, a banner headline screamed across the front page: “Eggs Over Easy: Caviar Prices Jump, Supply Dwindles.” Another more recent headline said, “Gold Louis Vuitton Toilet on Sale for $100,000.” When Rolls-Royce announced that Palm Beach was one of the few locations in the country where its new Bentley Continental Sedanca Coupé (top speed 155 miles per hour) would be unveiled, the story and accompanying photos filled nearly all of the top half of the front page.
After the story of her liaison with her bodyguard ran in the National Enquirer, Maples told the media she had been caught short and had to take a bathroom break. Wagner denied claims of an affair, too. But as media reports of the incident continued to circulate, Trump fired the bodyguard four months later. After he was fired, Wagner came forward and said he had slept with Maples after their “passion boiled over.”
A year later, Trump and Maples split, and in 1999 they divorced. In contrast to Melania, Maples resented his work ethic and his golfing. She opposed turning Mar-a-Lago into a club, saying she did not want to share the estate with others. Aside from their daughter Tiffany Trump, her one positive contribution was urging Trump to create Trump Spa, complete with complimentary fruit, fresh juices, and trail mix, just off the main pool. Trump promptly installed as the spa manager Angelia Savage, a stunning former Miss Florida who was third runner up in the 1996 Miss USA contest.
Trump’s thoughtful side manifested itself when Foerderer began having a problem with her eyes and had to stay at home. Trump called her every week and sent her baskets of gourmet food. When Foerderer died in September 2013, Trump attended her funeral and tweeted, “I have just lost my beautiful & elegant long time exec. assistant Norma Foerderer. She passed away yesterday—a truly magnificent woman.”
Rhona Graff originally worked with Foerderer as Trump’s second assistant and took her place as a senior vice president after Foerderer retired. She graduated from Queens College, from which she also received a master’s degree in education. Like Foerderer, Graff appeared on a few seasons of The Apprentice.
When it came to fending off the constant requests she received to see Trump, Graff had a velvet touch, treating everyone with respect. But when Trump thought someone was infringing on his territory—perhaps using his name for promotion—Graff could turn steely.
Describing Graff, Trump told Real Estate Weekly, “She is bright, articulate, extremely efficient and has proven herself to be responsible and loyal on every level.”
Graff was happy in New York and had no desire to follow her boss to the White House. During the transition, she trained the president’s new executive assistant, Madeleine Westerhout. At age twenty-six, Westerhout became a familiar face in late 2016, when cameras focused on her guiding an array of Trump pooh-bahs through the lobby of Trump Tower into an elevator or into the main entrance of Trump’s New Jersey golf club.
Dubbed the “elevator girl” by some media outlets, Westerhout is originally from California and holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. She worked as an assistant to Republican candidates at the state and federal level and took time off from college in 2012 to intern for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
Westerhout later became an assistant to the Republican National Committee’s chief of staff Katie Walsh and found herself assisting the president-elect’s transition team after Trump won the election. While Trump often dials numbers himself, Westerhout also places calls for him and helps schedule his appointments. Besides his landlines, the Secret Service issued him a mobile phone that encrypts conversations.