On Friday, the audience in the courtroom tensed when prosecutors announced the next person to testify on their behalf: Hope Hicks. She was the meticulously dressed, unfailingly polite aide, a former fashion model who developed a nuanced awareness of, and bottomless patience for, her mercurial charge. “She totally understands him,” Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s one-time campaign manager, said in 2016. Unlike other aides, she never had a falling out with Mr. Trump (or wrote a tell-all memoir), serving as the White House communications director and returning for the final year of his administration. But their closeness took a hit when it emerged in 2022 that she had voiced anger in a text message to a colleague over the fallout on Mr. Trump’s staff from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

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Persons: Donald J, Hope Hicks, Hicks’s, barker, ” Paul Manafort, Trump’s, Trump Organizations: Trump, White House, Capitol