- Longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks didn't buy into his false claims that he won the 2020 election.
- She told him to move on, according to the book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."
After the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump's longtime aide Hope Hicks told him what he didn't want to hear: He lost.
The close aide was preparing to leave the White House and stayed away from Trump's 2020 election challenges, even as he brooded and "talked of little else" in the aftermath of the race being called for President Joe Biden, wrote New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser in their new book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."
Hicks told Trump it was time to move on, according to the book set to publish Tuesday.
"Trump responded bitterly. 'Well, Hope doesn't believe in me,' he would say in meetings," they wrote. "'No, I don't,' she would reply. 'Nobody's convinced me otherwise.' She concluded any further efforts to try to steer Trump would simply be, as she told an associate, 'a waste of time.'"
Hicks worked for the Trump Organization and campaign before serving on the White House communications team and then, after some time at Fox Corporation, as counselor to Trump. But she was "marginalized" after telling Trump his election challenge was wrong and "did not even bother to go into the office" on January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol insurrection, according to the authors.
Some advisors thought Trump "wavered" on the big lie in the first few days after his loss and that he understood he had come up short. Once, the authors wrote, when seeing Biden on television, he said, "'Can you believe I lost to this fucking guy?'"
"But the kind of advisers who might have steered him toward acceptance were no longer around the brooding president, who remained cloistered for days after the election and talked of little else," the authors wrote.
Alyssa Farah, Trump's strategic communications director, soon resigned "out of disgust."
Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner "surrendered the field" when they saw the outgoing president was empowering his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who they blamed for his first impeachment, the authors wrote.
"'Obviously, I support you, but I can't help you on that,'" Kushner told Trump, as he related the story to another Republican at the time," the authors wrote.