Some in the media are casting 29-year-old White House communications director Hope Hicks as ditzy and reliant on men for her success as she gets ready to depart the West Wing.
Hicks announced last week that after remaining by President Trump’s side for the entire campaign and his first year in office, she was leaving her post in the White House.
NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” immediately mocked Hicks in a sketch over the weekend that portrayed her as boy-crazy and trivial.
“The media’s been so nice to me, like insanely nice to me,” said Hicks, as portrayed by Cecily Strong. The character reasoned that any positive coverage she got was “because my hair and face are good,” and said there were “tons of cute guys” at the White House.
Jessica Valenti, who writes on feminism for the British-based Guardian, predicted that Hicks would “leverage her celebrity and good looks into some sort of narrative that paints her as an unwitting victim” upon leaving the White House. She said, however, that “we can’t let the women of this administration take advantage of how white femininity is put on a pedestal.”
New York Times contributor Jill Filipovic wrote that Hicks had played the role of “dutiful daughter” to Trump and that she may have resigned because investigators involved in the Russia probe weren’t falling for her “good-girl routine.” Of Hicks’ potential future plans, Filipovic said there are a “lot of companies no doubt eager to hire a compliant, inoffensive woman with access to the president…”
Hicks almost never gave interviews during the time she’s been in the national public eye, and White House observers widely believed that her low-profile was a key to her longevity in Trump’s orbit, even while so many other aides and advisers were fired or left amid controversy.
But Hicks drew scrutiny when it was recently reported that she was romantically linked to Rob Porter, the former White House staff secretary who left his own role after allegations of spousal abuse became public.
Her presence in the White House was further magnified when she reportedly told members of the House Intelligence Committee that she occasionally tells “white lies” on behalf of president.
Tony Schwartz, who wrote Trump: Art of the Deal, said last week after Hicks announced her resignation that she’s “an enabler with spectacularly bad taste in men…”
Jia Tolentino, a writer for New Yorker magazine, also assessed Hicks by her relationship to men.
“Goodbye to Hope Hicks,” she said last week on Twitter, “an object lesson in the quickest way a woman can advance under misogyny: silence, beauty, and unconditional deference to men.”
