The silent and dutiful communications director departs.
Mr. Trump’s actual daughter, Ivanka, has made this two-step between competent professional and dutiful daughter into something of an art form, enjoying the benefits of a West Wing job while insisting it’s “inappropriate” to ask her questions about allegations of misconduct by her father — who also happens to be the man she works for. Ms. Hicks surely saw this narrow path to success under Mr. Trump and decided to walk it. The dutiful daughter strategy is one a man in her position could never have used. Mr. Trump, with his affinity for military men and mockery of male emotion would have seen such a subservient man as weak, but Ms. Hicks cannily leveraged the president’s own misogyny to her advantage.
It’s not the most feminist of moves, but Ms. Hicks was also in a position that many young women can recognize: working for a sexist boss who likes the women in his life, romantic and professional, to be slim variations on a very particular feminine model. Many of us have been polite in the face of boorishness and adapted hyperfeminine mannerisms in the company of chauvinists we were professionally obliged to please, putting success ahead of self-respect.
But of course, most of us weren’t working to elect and then sustain Donald Trump, a man whose attitude toward women and instability affects billions of people the world over, not just those working under him. Playing nice for such a president is a different calculation than, say, a dental hygienist, lawyer or Walmart cashier might make under a similarly sexist supervisor.
Being new to working in the political world, Ms. Hicks may not have made that decision at all. If you don’t see politics as a vehicle for positive change but rather as an abstraction shape-shifted into a job, and if you view the presidency as about power rather than public service, of course working to get your boss elected and then working closely with him in the White House would feel like nothing more than an exciting career opportunity. Why wouldn’t Ms. Hicks use every tool in her arsenal to remain in the good graces of her volatile boss, and climb up the ladder accordingly?
And yet, suddenly, she climbed off. It seems unlikely Ms. Hicks had a crisis of conscience; nor is she, an adult woman with agency and considerable privilege, a victim of her circumstances. More likely, she’s motivated by the same thing as her boss: unadulterated self-interest. Perhaps, finally, she realized the good-girl game is rigged to let the boys win.
The problem with being the mostly silent hardworking nice girl is that you also might end up the fall guy — the one who stays up all night finishing the project while your less-diligent peers knock off, the one who simply smiles tightly as a male colleague takes credit for your work. Or the one who, having long been a sympathetic filial ear for your very undisciplined boss, is finally being forced to talk — and realizing that your story does not sound good.
Ms. Hicks has already admitted to telling “white lies” for the president, a thoroughly banal disclosure from a member of an administration that hemorrhages blatant falsities as a matter of course, but that may prove problematic depending on who she lied to and what about.
The dutiful daughter gig always has a shelf life — maybe you get too old for it to be convincing; maybe your work environment changes and success hinges less on pleasing one prone-to-flattery man; maybe you learn the hard way that women who seek to ascend to the top eventually have to choose between being liked or respected (in a far more atypical scenario, maybe you find yourself embroiled in a federal investigation and investigators just aren’t going for the good-girl routine). At some point, most of us either choose or are forced to be adult women who own our ambition and take responsibility for our decisions.
The unfortunate truth is that Ms. Hicks probably isn’t there yet. Her departure is more likely a ticket to a lucrative PR or consulting gig than evidence of any quasi-feminist awakening or rejection of Trump-wrought devastation — there are a lot of companies no doubt eager to hire a compliant, inoffensive woman with access to the president, and offer her substantial sums in exchange.
But one can hope there’s something more interesting brewing beneath that placid surface. Maybe Hope Hicks will finally find her words.
