The 29-year-old former model’s meteoric rise pitched her into the maelstrom of Trumpworld before her abrupt departure

In the hyper-speed world of Donald Trump’s political career, Hope Hicks showed unusual staying power, lasting longer with the president, and staying closer to him, than anyone else lacking physical participation in his bloodline.

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So the news on Wednesday that Hicks planned to resign as White House communications director, first reported by the New York Times, landed as something of a surprise.

In just 30 months, the former model had gone from hustling campaign contacts to managing some of the most sensitive – and consequential – public moments for a White House full of people in potential legal jeopardy.

Hicks, 29, had the high-pressure job last summer of crafting, with the president, an explanation for his son Donald Trump Jr’s secret meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in New York in 2016 – an explanation later revealed as false. More recently, Hicks was said to have run the botched White House response to domestic abuse allegations against former aide Rob Porter, with whom she has been linked romantically.

For someone with zero political experience when she signed on to the Trump campaign for a January 2015 trip to Iowa, it was a meteoric – and potentially mind-boggling – rise.

But from another angle, the top job in Trump’s communications office was one that Hicks, a native of Greenwich, Connecticut, was born to do. Both her grandfathers worked in public relations, and her father was the former communications director for the National Football League.

It took two years for Hicks to land a fast-track public relations job in New York city after her graduation from Southern Methodist University, according to a 2016 GQ profile. There she was assigned to work on a particularly high-profile account: Ivanka Trump’s lifestyle brand.

Shortly after Hicks showed up at Trump Tower, the family organization poached her, hiring her full-time in October 2014 – just three months before she hit the campaign trail.

“She was able to build political experience quickly,” Trump told GQ. “She was very natural. She was very natural when it comes to picking it up, and a lot of people can’t pick it up, because it’s so fast-moving.”

Hicks won a reputation on the campaign trail for organization, decisiveness and, for a time, unflappability – until the New York Post’s gossip columnist caught her in May 2016 in a tearful public fight in the street with soon-to-be-former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump speaks to Hope Hicks on the golf course at his Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeen, Scotland, on 25 June 2016. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Hicks held on to see her candidate win. And her closeness to Trump had gone beyond their working relationship. In his incendiary insider account of the early White House days, journalist Michael Wolff wrote: “Hicks was in fact thought of as Trump’s real daughter, while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife.”

Hicks aggressively defended the president-elect and his team against charges of inappropriate ties to Russian figures.

“The campaign had no contact with Russian officials,” she said. Two days after the election, she said: “We are not aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with any foreign entities before yesterday, when Mr Trump spoke with many world leaders.”

The Washington Post has found that “members of the Trump campaign interacted with Russians at least 31 times throughout the campaign” in “at least 19 known meetings”.

Discrepancies such as those have perhaps accelerated Hicks’ political education. On Tuesday, the House intelligence committee questioned her for close to nine hours about the campaign’s Russia ties.

Hicks refused to answer some of the most sensitive questions, including about the explanation for Trump Jr’s meeting with Russians, according to House Democrat Adam Schiff.

But Hicks was said to have made one concession, admitting to having told, on an unspecified number of occasions, certain “white lies” on the president’s behalf.