Hope Hicks: Former Trump campaign spokeswoman takes over as White House Communications Director

Ms Hicks will assume the role left open by Anthony Scaramucci's dramatic departure

Hope Hicks, the former Trump campaign spokesperson and a top presidential aide, has been named interim White House Communications Director following the dramatic departure of former Director Anthony Scaramucci.

Ms Hicks, who is Mr Trump’s longest-serving political aide – and one of his most trusted – will fill the position while the White House looks for a permanent replacement.

The 28-year-old Greenwich, Connecticut native started working for the Trump family 2014, when Ivanka Trump hired her away from her public relations job at Hiltzik Strategies. Ms Hicks worked closely with the President's eldest daughter at the Trump Organisation until January 2015, when Mr Trump asked the then-26-year-old political ingenue to be his campaign press secretary.

"I think it’s the year of the outsider,” Ms Hicks says the President told her at the time. “It helps to have people with outsider perspective.”

Since Mr Trump’s inauguration, Ms Hicks has served as both presidential adviser and White House Director of Strategic Communications. She earns the White House’s top salary, and is said to play a key role in deciding which reporters get access to the President. She maintains close ties with Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Ms Hicks enters a position fraught with tension, following her predecessor's headline-making departure. Mr Scaramucci lasted 10 days in his White House role, departing after giving a profanity-laden tirade to a reporter for the New Yorker. His predecessor, Michael Dubke, left the office in May amid rumours that he would be fired.

The position is a difficult one, centred in the middle of an ongoing fight between Mr Trump and the media. The President, who has denounced the mainstream press as “fake news” and retweeted violent memes about CNN, is also said to crave attention from outlets like the New York Times.

Mr Trump furthered inflamed tensions with the press this week, in an unscheduled, unscripted question-and-answer session at Trump Tower. In the 20-minute press conference, Mr Trump defended the preservation of Confederate monuments and equated leftist protestors with neo-Nazis and white nationalists.

“You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he said.

Like many of his previous comments, Mr Trump’s words on Tuesday drew outcry from both the left and right. Ms Hicks, however, has defended the President’s unconventional tactics.

“There is just no way that a camera or an episode or a documentary could capture what has gone on,” she told Marie Claire during Mr Trump's campaign. “There is nothing like it.”

She added: “I would say 90 percent of that is the people you see and the things they say, and the way they react to Mr. Trump. It is the most unbelievable, awe-inspiring thing.”