Latest news with #HopeHicks
New York Times
27-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
How's It Playing? POTUS Wants to Know.
There's a question President Trump likes to ask people around him when he's facing a major challenge or considering a big decision. It's not 'Why did this happen?' or 'What are my options?' or anything so straightforward as 'How does this affect American interests?' It's a more impressionistic question; any answer might sound equally authoritative, even if only one answer is preferred. 'How's it playing?' Trump posed it soon after Israel launched its first attacks against Iran. The president 'asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were 'playing,'' The Times reported. 'He said that 'everyone' was telling him he needed to get more involved.' Trump made the same query shortly after surviving an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., last summer. Dan Scavino, the president's deputy chief of staff, later recalled that it was the first thing Trump asked him when Scavino went to the hospital and showed him the iconic photograph of a blood-streaked presidential candidate pumping his fist in the air. 'Hey, Dan, how's it playing?' Trump asked. It was also his question after his 2023 indictment — the first ever of a former U.S. president — on charges of falsifying business records to hide a payments to a porn star. In his recent book, 'All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America,' Michael Wolff reports that Trump asked his lawyers, before the drive to the courthouse, 'How's it playing?' (In her testimony in the case, Hope Hicks, a former aide to the president, acknowledged that though she did not recall exactly what Trump said to her after The Wall Street Journal reported on the hush money, 'I'm almost certain he would've asked me how's it playing.') According to Wolff, Trump tried to rank the relative play of two events normally considered disastrous for a politician. 'Do you think indictment is bigger than impeachment?' he asked an aide. The aide tried to distinguish the legal jeopardy of indictment versus the political risk of impeachment, which wasn't what Trump had in mind. 'Everyone understands that by 'bigger,' Trump means is it playing bigger — more drama, more attention?' Wolff writes. 'That's the answer he wants: It's bigger because it's bigger!' There is nothing wrong with a president gauging public reaction to or support for administration policies or actions. The people are his constituents, after all. It makes sense to assess popular perceptions through, say, polling, or to canvass opinions from trusted advisers, or to rally national sentiment through speeches, posts or some other communications strategy. (When presidents or political candidates insist that they don't pay attention to polls, all that means is that they saw the polls and didn't like what they said.) Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
CNN
11-06-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Federal appeals court wrestles with Trump effort to fight hush money conviction
A federal appeals court in New York wrangled Wednesday with President Donald Trump's claim that his hush money conviction should be reviewed by federal courts and seemed open to the idea that the Supreme Court's landmark immunity decision may weigh in the president's favor. 'It seems to me that we got a very big case that created a whole new world of presidential immunity,' US Circuit Judge Myrna Pérez, who was nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden, said at one point during oral arguments. 'The boundaries are not clear at this point.' At issue is whether Trump can move his state court case on 34 counts of falsifying business records to federal court, where he hopes to argue that prosecutors violated the Supreme Court's immunity decision last year by using certain evidence against him, including testimony from former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks. 'The scope of a federal constitutional immunity for the president of the United States should be decided by this court and the Supreme Court, not by New York state courts,' said Jeffrey Wall, a former acting US solicitor general who is representing Trump in the case. 'Everything about this cries out for federal court.' The Supreme Court's decision last year granted Trump immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts and barred prosecutors from attempting to enter evidence about them, even if they are pursuing alleged crimes involving that president's private conduct. Without that prohibition on evidence, the Supreme Court reasoned, a prosecutor could 'eviscerate the immunity' the court recognized by allowing a jury to second-guess a president's official acts. And so, the underlying question is whether prosecutors crossed that line by including the testimony from Hicks and former executive assistant Madeleine Westerhout, as well as a series of social media posts Trump authored during his first term criticizing the hush money case. The three-judge panel of the New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, all appointed by Democratic presidents, asked probing questions of both sides and it wasn't clear after more than an hour of arguments how they would decide the case. The judges pressed the attorney representing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on why the Supreme Court's decision last year didn't preclude the evidence at issue in the case. 'The Supreme Court used very broad language in talking about evidentiary immunity,' noted Circuit Judge Susan Carney. Bragg's office has countered that it's too late for federal courts to intervene. That's because Trump was already convicted and sentenced. Prosecutors have also argued that the evidence at issue wasn't the kind the Supreme Court was referring to. Hicks may have been a White House official when she testified, they said, but she was speaking about actions Trump took in a private capacity. 'The fact that we are now past the point of sentencing would be a compelling reason to find no 'good cause' for removal,' said Steven Wu, who was representing Bragg. Federal officials facing prosecution in state courts may move their cases to federal court in many circumstances under a 19th century law designed to ensure states don't attempt to prosecute them for conduct performed 'under color' of a US office or agency. A federal government worker, for instance, might seek to have a case moved to federal court if they are sued after getting into a car accident while driving on the job. Wu analogized Trump's argument to a postal worker who commits a crime on the weekend and then confesses to his boss at work on Monday. The confession, even though it happened in a post office, doesn't suddenly convert the content of the conversation to an official US Postal Service action. 'The criminal charges were private and unofficial conduct,' Wu said. Trump was ultimately sentenced in January without penalty. He had been accused of falsifying a payment to his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to cover up a $130,000 payment Cohen made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels to keep her from speaking out before the 2016 election about an alleged affair with Trump. (Trump has denied the affair.) US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton, denied Trump's request to move the case to federal court – keeping his appeals instead in New York courts. Trump, who frequently complained about the New York trial court judge in his case, Juan Merchan, has said he wants his case heard in an 'unbiased federal forum.'
Daily Mail
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE 'Missing' Trump aide Hope Hicks returns to the fold with an Ivanka embrace... as insiders reveal heartbreaking reason she's been in hiding
President Donald Trump 's glamorous former aide Hope Hicks was back in the MAGA orbit in Miami this past weekend. The former White House communications director, who was a pivotal figure in president's 2016 campaign and most of his first term, cozied up with pals Ivanka Trump and her husband at glitzy events for the city's Race Week.
