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11
WIRETAP
ith three screens in his White House bedroom, the president was his own best cable
y Y curator. But for print he depended on Hope Hicks. Hicks, who had been his junior
aide for most of the campaign and his spokesperson (although, as he would point out, he
was really his own spokesperson), had been, many thought, pushed to the sidelines in the
West Wing by the Bannonites, the Goldman wing, and the Priebus-RNC professionals. To
the senior staff, she seemed not only too young and too inexperienced—she was famous
among campaign reporters for her hard-to-maneuver-in short skirts—but a way-too-
overeager yes woman, always in fear of making a mistake, ever tremulously second-
guessing herself and looking for Trump’s approval. But the president kept rescuing her
—“Where’s Hope?”—from any oblivion others tried to assign her to. Baffling to almost
everyone, Hicks remained his closest and most trusted aide, with, perhaps, the single most
important job in this White House: interpreting the media for him in the most positive way
it could be interpreted, and buffering him from the media that could not be positively
spun.
The day after his “reset” speech before the joint session of Congress presented a certain
conundrum for Hicks. Here were the first generally good notices for the administration.
But in the Post, the Times, and the New Yorker that day, there was also an ugly bouquet of
very bad news. Fortunately the three different stories had not quite sunk into cable, so
there was yet a brief respite. And at least for the better part of the day, March 1, Hicks
herself did not entirely seem to grasp how bad the news actually was.
The Washington Post’s story was built around a leak from a Justice Department source
(characterized as a “former senior American official”—hence, most likely someone from
the Obama White House) saying that the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had, on two
occasions, met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
When the president was shown the story, he didn’t see its significance. “So what?” he
said.
Well, during his confirmation, it was explained to the president, Sessions had said he
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