A key player from the first Trump administration is joining Megyn Kelly’s new media company.
Hope Hicks, who served as White House communications director from 2017 to 2018, will be the chief operating officer of Kelly’s Devil May Care Media. Hicks left the administration to serve as executive vice president at the Fox Corporation in 2018 before returning to the White House in 2020, where her final job title was counselor to the president.
The former model and Greenwich, Conn., native had a meteoric rise to the center of the Trump universe, from being hand-picked to serve as Trump’s press secretary during the 2016 campaign to becoming one of his closest confidants in the White House.
Trump was said to appreciate Hicks’ background in public relations, which included stints at multiple New York PR firms and working for the Trump Organization on Ivanka Trump’s fashion line.
Hicks and Kelly have each had a complicated relationship with Trump.
In 2022, The New York Times reported that Hicks disagreed sharply with Trump about the outcome of the 2020 election—a disagreement that became public when the January 6 Select Committee interviewed Hicks.
She also testified for the prosecution during the Stormy Daniels trial, where she told a New York jury that Trump officials attempted to keep former Playboy model Karen McDougal from speaking about an alleged affair she had with Trump.
Kelly, meanwhile, has become a vocal supporter of the president on her podcast—saying recently that she’s “100 percent rooting for him”—despite being one of his fiercest critics at the beginning of his political career.
When she was a Fox News host, she challenged then-candidate Trump at a 2015 presidential campaign debate over his history of disparaging comments about women.
Trump responded by insulting Kelly on CNN, remarking, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her … wherever.”
Kelly decamped from Fox in 2017 for an anchor role at NBC News. She spent two years there before launching Devil May Care Media in 2020.
In addition to The Megyn Kelly Show, which has 3.7 million subscribers on YouTube, her new media company includes another show from Kelly and soon-to-be-released content from journalists Mark Halperin and Maureen Callahan.
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