Hope Hicks’s White Lies and Smizing Eyes

Image may contain Tie Accessories Accessory Suit Coat Clothing Overcoat Apparel Human Person and Donald Carcieri
If you are going to tell Congress that working as the communications director for the Trump White House involved telling only “white lies,” you’d better come with your game face on.Photography by Chip Somodevilla / Getty

It is often mentioned that Hope Hicks, the departing White House communications director, used to model, a fact that seems of little relevance to her political life. But it does perhaps help to explain the photo of Hicks, taken by Chip Somodevilla, of Getty, that has been circulating since Tuesday. Arriving at the Capitol to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, Hicks, dressed in a wide-lapel navy-blue coat, turned her contoured face toward the camera and gave a perfect, ten-out-of-ten smize. “Smizing”—smiling with your eyes—is a neologism that Tyra Banks, the host of “America’s Next Top Model,” coined to teach the show’s contestants how to hold a viewer’s attention. To smile without smizing is merely to gesture emptily toward an expression, like a school kid holding a grin for a class picture, or a politician who has already shaken fifty hands and must now shake a fifty-first. But to smize without smiling is to create a frisson of mystery, a hint of some secret mental calculus at work behind the mask of the face.

This is harder than it seems. Smizing takes skill. Try it out in your bathroom mirror: you will likely do too much and wind up with crazy eyes (crize?), or do so little that the change is imperceptible. Mona Lisa smizes. The young woman in Vermeer’s “Portrait of a Young Woman” smizes. And, walking into what turned out to be a nine-hour session of questioning about what she may or may not have known regarding Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election, Hicks smized as if her life depended on it—which, to some extent, it did. If you are going to tell Congress that working as the communications director for the Trump White House involves telling only “white lies,” you’d better come with your game face on.

Or could there be something more to Hicks’s expression, a certain demure acknowledgment that she has finally wound up as the focus of all those camera flashes? During her tenure on Team Trump, Hicks has made a point of avoiding the spotlight. This has involved some bizarre contortions. When the reporter Olivia Nuzzi profiled her for GQ, in 2016, Hicks, then the Trump campaign’s press secretary, declined to be interviewed but opted to sit in the room as Nuzzi interviewed Trump about her. As photogenic as she is, she has tended to appear in the background of White House images—a wise choice, when your boss is a megalomaniac. (There are exceptions. Last fall, at a state dinner in Japan, Hicks made headlines by appearing in a black tuxedo and floppy bow tie, like a Bond girl in Marlene Dietrich drag, upstaging even the First Lady.) Hicks has earned a reputation as a gifted Trump-whisperer, placating the President while resolutely stonewalling the rest of us; never has a White House communications director been so uncommunicative with the public. But her image as an enigmatic, sober figure in a fun house of buffoons has been crucial to her work, and to her success. It is easy to underestimate a young, attractive woman in a position of great responsibility, to see her as a pawn rather than a player on her own terms.

Recently, though, Hicks has been pulled toward the center of attention. She helped draft a statement defending Rob Porter, the former White House staff secretary accused of domestic abuse, with whom Hicks has apparently had a romantic relationship. (Porter has denied the abuse allegations.) And now she has been drawn into the Mueller investigation. In January, the Times reported, Hicks swore that e-mails written by Donald Trump, Jr., regarding his meeting during the election with Russian operatives “will never get out,” raising the question of whether she might obstruct justice. Maybe in this Bond film she’s a villain after all: White Lie, a silent but deadly deflector of the truth.

A day after her congressional testimony, Hicks informed the President of her intention to resign from her post. In light of this sudden turn of events, Hicks’s smize seems to suggest a certain degree of jubilance at the knowledge that soon she would be gone from Washington. She was a high-powered P.R. flack who ran away to join the circus, and now she wanted to go home again. On the other hand, it has been reported that Trump, furious with Hicks for admitting that she had fudged on his behalf, pressured her to go. Once, her ignorance counted as a qualification. “I said, ‘What do you know about politics?’ ” Trump boasted, in late 2016, recalling the moment he hired Hicks. “She said, ‘Absolutely nothing.’ I said, ‘Congratulations, you’re into the world of politics.’ ” Now she knows too much, but, whatever it is, she isn’t telling—yet.