David Remnick: Hope Against Hope

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hope-hicks-against-hope

Hope Against Hope
Hope Hicks is kidding herself if she thinks that her tenure in the Trump White House will be judged only for harmless, situational untruths.

By David Remnick
February 28, 2018



Presidents are in the habit of lying—often with bloody consequences. The Bay of Pigs, the Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, Iran-Contra, “mushroom clouds,” and “weapons of mass destruction”—these are just a few of the postwar greatest hits. But, in terms of frequency and of the almost joyful abandonment of integrity as a demand of the office, Donald Trump is singular. He starts lying in the morning, tweeting while watching Fox News, and he keeps at it until his head hits the pillow at night. He lies to slander and seduce, he lies to profit, and he sometimes lies, it seems, just because. His capacity for falsehood is so heroic that we struggle to keep count of the daily instances. (After one year of the Trump Presidency, the Washington Post put the average at 5.9 falsehoods per day, a total of 2,140.) One consequence of this aspect of Trump’s character—oftentimes, it seems to be the very core of his character—is that lying defines the culture of his Administration just as it did his family business.

Hope Hicks has now announced that she is resigning as Trump’s communications director. This comes just one day after she told the House Intelligence Committee, in a nine-hour closed-door session, that she was occasionally given to telling “white lies.” In the moral universe of the Trump White House, her sin could not have been the lying; it could only be the admission.

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Perhaps we will hear from Hope Hicks in a more unguarded way in the future. The pattern has been that, once these aides lose their White House passes and get some distance from the tumult of Pennsylvania Avenue, they begin to reveal their sense of despair about the place, if not their shame. Everyone hates everyone; everyone has it out for the rest. Just today the President tweeted that his Attorney General was “disgraceful.” “Take everything you’ve heard and multiply it by fifty,” Reince Priebus is quoted as saying in a new chapter of “The Gatekeepers,” a book on White House chiefs of staff, by Chris Whipple.

Trump has created a poisonous culture in his Administration that is not only doing great damage to the country but is also destroying itself. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, is known by foreign leaders to be so hungry for business and open to influence that he’s been denied the security clearances that a President’s emissary would need. Now the Times has revealed that he has taken tens of millions of dollars in loans from financial interests that only recently came to do White House business with him.

The Oval Office used to be described as a chaotic “Grand Central Station,” mobbed with warring satraps hustling for the President’s fleeting attentions. One after another, they have headed for, or they have been shown, the door. Perhaps Hope Hicks will retain her sense of discretion long after she leaves the White House. In any case, it is hard to agree that her deceptions were merely occasional or, as she put it to the House members, “white lies”; the self-deception required to serve Donald Trump with such unquestioning devotion, to be his voice, knowing what she must know, has proved anything but harmless.

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