Below is a midterm I did for one of my grad-school classes last month. For those of you who may not know, I’m in the Political Communication program at American University. I started last fall and have another three semesters to go after this one (I’m counting down to December 2019).
I decided to post it because I think it helps explain the president’s crazier-than-usual tirades and actions in the last few months. In the paper, I make the case that Hope Hicks’ departure from the White House is the epicenter of it all because she was essentially his emotional foundation, the glue that kept him together (by Trumpian standards, of course).
Since submitting the midterm, things have gotten even crazier. This was before John Bolton arrived, the strikes on Syria, schoolyard taunting of James Comey, and more. I say “and more” because one month is the equivalent of three in the Trump era.
Enjoy and try not to worry too much – our system of government has done a pretty good job at averting the worst of the worst. Note: the tone is rather casual for an academic midterm because the assignment was to pick the communications strategy of a high-level public official and critique it as if we were writing for a publication. I chose Crooked.com.
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The Trump presidency has truly been the raging dumpster fire at the heart of today’s toxic political climate. Since winning the Electoral College and becoming president, his time has been marked by a constant onslaught of scandal, disgrace, and corruption. From ridiculous tweets that have literally threatened the global order to firing dozens of high-level administration officials as if it were the latest season of The Apprentice, Donald Trump has discarded and destroyed presidential norms left and right.
At the center of this shit-show has been one constant: 29-year-old White House Communications Director Hope Hicks…who has since left the administration, an action that has essentially unleashed a new level of crazy on the world from President Trump.
Lately, it seems like he’s upped the firings of senior officials and even hastily agreed to become the first sitting U.S. president to meet—face-to-face—with the dictator of North Korea. The source of the president’s instability is obviously his own mind, but it’s also a little more complicated. Trump is a vindictive little man who distrusts all but a select few. When he’s emotionally wounded, he lashes out and deflects attention to other issues. It’s what he’s always done. With Hicks recent departure, we’re seeing a bit of both.
On the last day of February, she resigned and abruptly left the sinking ship that is the Trump Administration. Prior to that move, she could be found at or near the center of the many scandals that have rocked the White House since January 2017 (and the campaign in 2015 and ’16).
She had two of the most valuable assets in the wild world of Trump: his ear and his trust. As was reported in Politico last year, Hicks was basically the only member of his shrinking communications team that Trump still trusted. “She’s the only person he trusts,” a source for a recent cover story of New York Magazine said. “He doesn’t trust any men and never has. He doesn’t like men, you see. He has no male friends.”
Often described as a sort of daughter figure in Trump’s eyes, Hicks became an emotional and professional anchor to the 45th president. She was one of the few people in Trump’s inner circle who could both tell him what he wanted and needed to hear, even acting as a shield for other staffers against his frequent outbursts. “This is the most toxic working environment on the planet,” one staffer told Axios. “There’s no leadership, no trust, no direction and at this point there’s very little hope.”
They were incredibly close, and I have no doubt that he legitimately cared for her. Now she’s out…and the president’s gone crazy. Twice since then (only a few weeks), the president has made two major announcements that have reverberated around the world (steel and aluminum tariffs on all imports and a planned meeting with Kim Jong Un) and another that has landed like a bomb in Washington (Secretary Tillerson’s firing). All these rash actions, I believe, can be tied to Hope Hicks’ departure.
After a brutal Mueller hearing, in which she admitted to lying for President Trump, and a swift West Wing exit, it’s safe to say that The Donald has not exactly taken the exit all that well. After all, he specifically chose her to run press relations when he began his presidential campaign in 2015; He told her she would take the job because of his trust in her—trust gained after her public relations work for Ivanka—according to reporting by Gabriel Sherman during the campaign. It’s hard to believe that she quit less than a month ago, but that’s our reality now: a parallel Earth where Trump is the most powerful man it and time goes by three times as fast.
For clarity’s sake, I’ll start with her sudden resignation announcement on February 28. The New York Times initially broke the news on Wednesday with the simple-yet-direct headline “Hope Hicks to Leave Post as White House Communications Director.” Sources in the White House told the Times that she had been planning to resign before her testimony before the House Intelligence Committee (the day before) regarding the Trump-Russia scandal, another scandal in which Hicks was in the middle. Let the lashing out and deflections begin.
Since Hick’s surprise announcement, the mood at the White House has become even darker and more paranoid. In a March 3 scoop from the Washington Post, Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker, and Josh Dawsey describe a setting out of Dante’s Inferno. “Inside the White House, aides over the past week have described an air of anxiety and volatility—with an uncontrollable commander in chief at its center.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity, 22 unnamed officials describe the president as basically a mess of paranoia, cable news binges, and angry outbursts. While this is nothing new (see Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and a year’s worth of reporting), there is a worry that this time could be different. “I think the president is starting to wobble in his emotional stability and this is not going to end well,” Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey told the Post. A simple look at his favorite communications platform can confirm this assessment.
I had the unfortunate pleasure of combing through the president’s tweets (those from the @realDonaldTrump account) to see what patterns I could find in his communication strategy after Hicks’ resignation announcement. Between March 1 (the day after) and 20, he sent out 113 tweets on a wide variety of topics. Individual tweets often contained multiple subjects, and in true Trump style, one tweet was often completely unrelated to the previous. Among the most-mentioned topics were: international trade and tariffs (22 mentions); economic indicators pointing to a healthy economy (15 mentions); the FBI and House Russia investigations (12 mentions); mainstream media and accusations of “fake news” (9 mentions); mentions of White House personnel and Cabinet secretaries (8 mentions); and the ongoing tensions and negotiations with North Korea (8 mentions). These largely correspond to the three major incidents mentioned before: tariffs announcement; North Korean meeting; and Tillerson’s firing.
The first: On March 1, President Trump announced the imposition of steel and aluminum tariffs: 25 percent and 10 percent respectively. Incredibly, even for this White House, the final plans for and review of the tariffs were weeks from being finalized. The announcement was given at a roundtable event with steel industry executives after a reporter asked the president what the tariffs would be. Neither the exact figures nor the overall announcement was included in his planned remarks, and the White House legal team was still reviewing the then-proposed tariffs from the Department of Commerce. His advisors were so caught off guard that the most senior of the bunch, Gary Cohn, resigned in frustration.
This impromptu tariff decision makes sense when you consider Trump’s volatile psyche. We know he prizes loyalty and devotion above all else. The one constant in his life is dependence on loyalists. When that is shaken, all hell breaks loose. As it turns out, hell had broken loose.
NBC News reported that the president had become “unglued” and was “gunning for a fight,” before the roundtable. When you factor the Hope Hicks angle into the equation, still fresh and raw in the president’s memory, it makes perfect sense that this emotionally immature man with a lack of inhibition would do what he did. It also makes sense that he saw it as a perfect deflection, something new for Washington punditry to talk about instead of staff shakeups and the Russia investigation.
His tweets echoed the anger. “We must not let our country, companies and workers be taken advantage of any longer,” Trump tweeted the same day. The following day, he shocked the world and even his own party by tweeting, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win … It’s easy!”
He wasn’t done. The following day’s tweets included gems like “[America’s trading partners] laugh at what fools our leaders have been. No more!” and a shot at our closest allies in the world: “If the E.U. [sic] wants to further increase their already massive tariffs and barriers on U.S. companies doing business there, we will simply apply a Tax [sic] on their Cars [sic] which freely pour into the U.S. They make it impossible for our cars (and more) to sell there. Big trade imbalance!” Of course, he had more hell to break loose.
The second incident: On March 8, President Trump agreed to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, the first time in history a sitting U.S. president has agreed to do so. Aside from the facts that this was a complete 180 from his past provocations (“Little Rocket Man”, “Fire and fury like the world has never seen”) and the State Department had literally just said that talks would definitely not happen for the foreseeable future, the way the announcement came to be was…unusual.
That evening, senior officials from the South Korean government—not including President Trump or any other U.S. officials, oddly—held a makeshift press conference just outside the Oval Office, where they had been deliberating with the president. The statement, which included praise for Trump’s leadership and supposed deal-making abilities, was relatively brief and a complete surprise: President Trump had agreed to the dictator’s invitation, a move that has the potential to elevate North Korea’s status as a major international player on the world stage.
Later, we learned that the agreement was made with the same level of care that goes into picking which podcast to listen to on a commute. According to reporting by Peter Baker and Choe Sang-Hun for the New York Times, the president hastily agreed to the meeting as soon as officials finished making the case for a meeting, almost as if his mind was elsewhere (spoiler: there’s a 99 percent chance it was). The move stunned both American and South Korean officials as they assumed that he would at least consult with foreign policy advisors before agreeing. “And just like that, in the course of 45 minutes in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump threw aside caution and dispensed with decades of convention to embark on a daring, high-wire diplomatic gambit aimed at resolving one of the world’s most intractable standoffs,” Baker and Sang-Hun noted.
Trump’s tweets on the subject of North Korea were suddenly more positive. “North Korea has not conducted a Missile [sic] Test [sic] since November 28, 2017 and has promised not to do so through our meetings. I believe they will honor that commitment!” As if it were part of the plan all along, he then tweeted that the press was “startled” and “amazed” and “couldn’t believe it.” Indeed, U.S. media outlets ran with stories on the meeting for days. Hope Hicks, while not old news, was already in the media’s rearview mirror.
Joe Scarborough argued that the North Korea agreement was nothing more than a tactic of deflection, another way for the president to shift the growing spotlight on the Stormy Daniels scandal to a potential breakthrough in U.S.-North Korean relations. That may be the main reason. But just over a week before, his emotional anchor in the White House called it quits. So, why not upend political convention yet again and get the media to talk about something else? Because diverting attention is something he does when he’s unstable and feels threatened. And he wasn’t done.
The third incident: The next week, he tweeted: “Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!”
Let’s unpack this mess: First, both of those positions have to be confirmed by the Senate. As he should know very well by now, he can’t just appoint people to Cabinet positions by simple decree (or tweet).
Second: This was the first time that anyone—including Tillerson—heard of the shakeup. On Twitter. Without being told in advance. The president literally tweet-fired America’s top diplomat.
Third: Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel in positions of power in the intelligence community is worrisome to say the least. Pompeo is widely seen as a hawkish conservative with more regard for force than diplomacy. Haspel, on the other hand, was busted years ago for running an overseas CIA torture site for the Bush Administration…and then she tried to destroy the evidence.
Fourth: He ended the tweet with “Congratulations to all!” which obviously includes the guy he just fired over Twitter. How thoughtful.
Does any of this matter to a man who’s feeling emotionally vulnerable and is incapable of behaving like an adult? Of course not.
Regardless of the nasty working relationship between Trump and Tillerson, the timing can’t be overlooked: two weeks after losing the linchpin of the West Wing, the president fired the Secretary of State and named his replacement in the same virtual breath. There had been credible rumors for several months that Tillerson’s tenure was on life support, rumors that reached a fever pitch when he didn’t deny reporting that he had called the president a “fucking moron” behind the president’s back, which the president himself didn’t hear about until the original story broke in early October 2017. Even after that, Tillerson remained. It wasn’t until shortly after Hope Hick’s resignation that President Trump followed through (in the tackiest way possible).
It’s possible that these events had nothing to do with Hope Hicks departure, a story the White House insists is true because the White House says so. Maybe it was nothing more than an afterthought. I have no doubt that Mueller’s investigation is driving the president crazy and that much of his lashing out can be attributed to it, the biggest scandal in American political history. Trump is unstable and shoots from the hip, something New Yorkers have known since the 1980s.
However, given what we know about Trump’s emotional state and how fragile it is, there’s a good possibility that some of the craziest days in contemporary West Wing history can be traced back to Ms. Hicks departure. If it proves one thing, it’s that Donald Trump was never fit for the job in the first place. Sadly, America’s learning that the hard way.
micah the millennial 