After meeting Matthew Hiltzik, a New York PR shark, in 2011, Hicks landed a job at his firm. It was here that she began working with Ivanka, putting her in the orbit of The Donald, who was quickly impressed. “I thought Hope was outstanding,” Trump told me, recalling his decision to tell Hiltzik that he was poaching Hicks to work for him. In Trump's telling, Hiltzik was powerless to deny him what he wanted. “I wouldn't say he was thrilled,” Trump told me, “but, you know, we give him a lot of business.” (Hiltzik says the parting was amicable all around.)

So Hicks joined the team at Trump Tower in October 2014, without any idea her new boss intended to become president. Or that she had just signed on to his campaign.

One day in late January of last year, Hicks was summoned to Trump's office. There she found Michael Cohen, Trump's ball-busting attorney, and Sam Nunberg, a nervy political adviser and protégé of Trump confidant Roger Stone. On the speakerphone was Corey Lewandowski, a journeyman operative whom Trump had just hired for a purpose unclear to Hicks.

To the assembled, Trump said simply: We're going to Iowa. Hicks must have known that that meant jumping into a media circus that might change her life, though she wondered only one thing, half in jest: What do people wear in Iowa? Soon she was at the Iowa Freedom Summit, fielding media requests and improvising in the role of real-deal political press secretary.

Within the tight, alpha-male circle of hired guns, Nunberg could sense her unease. A tall, heavyset man with slicked-back hair, Nunberg gifted Hicks a book, Running for Office. He nicknamed his new friend “Hopesicle” and quickly developed a fondness for her. “She was very cute, because she was very anxious at first about all of this,” he told me as he sipped a Thai iced tea at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. “I joked with her once, like, ‘You're like my Peggy, like I'm Don Draper.’ ”

In reality, there was plenty of competition for the role of bizarro Don Draper in the Trump gang. Michael Cohen—a consigliere of The Donald's for a decade, with a near-parody Long Island accent—told me he didn't know what to make of the novice Hicks. When he answered my call, he was in the midst of yelling at someone else on his other phone (showing a dexterity with the phone Trump would have appreciated, I'm sure). He described Hicks to me as a “sensitive person” who “takes things personally” when it comes to the coverage of her boss.

Hicks wasn't expecting to be the press secretary for long. Trips to key primary states came and went with nobody taking her place, though. Just ahead of Trump's formal announcement in June, Hicks's ambivalence about her position created drama fit for an episode of The Apprentice. Lewandowski, a short man with a shorter fuse who looks like a cross between Frank Sinatra's mug shot and Voldemort, would play a starring role.

A 42-year-old operative who'd worked for the Tea Party group Americans for Prosperity, Lewandowski was now the campaign manager. Hicks was told she couldn't work for both the political and corporate branches of the Trump team. She had to choose: Join the campaign or go back to the kids' floor of Trump Tower. Hicks, who hates to disappoint, nonetheless told Lewandowski he'd have to find a new press secretary, which apparently set him off. “He made her cry a bunch of times,” Nunberg said. In Nunberg's telling, Lewandowski said to Hicks, “You made a big fucking mistake; you're fucking dead to me.” Lewandowski declined to either confirm or correct Nunberg's recollection. “I don't recall the specifics of that,” he told me. “I can say definitively that I don't recall the specific incident that you're referring to.”

Hicks reconsidered when Trump told her to stay. As she traveled with him and a tiny band of staffers around the country, things with Lewandowski eventually mended. Meanwhile, Lewandowski was consolidating power. Racist Facebook posts Nunberg had made beginning in 2007 surfaced and prompted his firing. (He trashed everyone from Al Sharpton to Marxist Muslims to Louis Farrakhan.) Nunberg believes it was Hicks and Lewandowski who petitioned Trump for his ouster and drafted a brutal statement that characterized him as a “low-level part-time consultant.”

Nunberg still seemed wounded eight months later, when we met. “Of course she ratfucked me, which makes me proud,” he told me. Nunberg maintains no feelings of warmth for Lewandowski. “I literally will suck the fucking blood out of his skull by the time I'm done with him,” he said like a screwball gangster. Not long after Nunberg's firing, his mentor, Stone, left. (Stone says he quit, but the campaign claims he was fired.) The circle was getting smaller, and Hicks, the only staffer without a bald spot or a tough-guy lilt, had apparently learned how to hang on.

Trump's campaign headquarters in Trump Tower occupy an old fifth-floor production studio for The Apprentice. The walls are plywood, decorated by lawn signs and cutouts of Trump. For warmth there's a space heater. Befitting its TV past, the place feels quite literally like the backstage workroom from which the whole Trump Show is produced.

Getting the most out of the star requires keeping him informed. While Trump nurses an obvious addiction to cable news, the reading that's put in front of him is largely confined to a topic he already knows well. Every morning, staffers print out 30 to 50 Google News results for “Donald J. Trump.” He then goes at the sheaf with a marker, making circles and arrows and annotating things he likes or doesn't like. The defaced article gets scanned and e-mailed to the journalist or the person quoted who has drawn Trump's attention, under the subject line “From the office of Donald J. Trump.”