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