Gidley served as the director of Huck PAC. His past activities include director of media operations for
Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, Executive Director of the
South Carolina Republican Party, Press Secretary to the
David Beasley for
Senate campaign, the
Karen Floyd for Superintendent of Education campaign, and
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole's
campaign committee. He was director of communications for
Rick Santorum's
2012 presidential campaign.
Trump administration The Trump administration announced on October 10, 2017, that Gidley would serve as Deputy Press Secretary, and he started his job at the
White House the next day. In February 2018, after
Special Counsel Mueller's indictment of 13 Russian nationals appeared, in the administration's view, to prove that no collusion occurred between the Trump campaign and Russia, Gidley said that there "are two groups that have created chaos more than the Russians and that’s the Democrats and the mainstream media. In January 2019, Gidley was promoted to deputy press secretary, succeeding
Raj Shah. In June 2019, he was considered a candidate for
White House Press Secretary when
Sarah Sanders announced she was stepping down from the role.
Stephanie Grisham was named to the position, with Gidley continuing as deputy press secretary. On September 5, 2019, Gidley and Grisham published an opinion piece in
The Washington Times, entitled "The ''Washington Post's
lost summer", which criticized the Post'' for publishing opinion pieces as news that pushed what they called a "lost summer" narrative about the alleged lack of Trump's accomplishments, even though, as Gidley and Grisham showed in their piece, the
Post had elsewhere reported on several Trump accomplishments, including a link to a
Post story titled "Trump becomes first sitting president to set foot into North Korea." In June 2020, Gidley resigned as deputy press secretary to serve as the national press secretary of the Trump
reelection campaign. He was succeeded as deputy press secretary by Brian R. Morgenstern, a former official in the
United States Department of the Treasury. In January 2021, after being asked by Fox's
Bill Hemmer whether Donald Trump had been emasculated by his removal from social media, Gidley called Trump "the most masculine person to ever hold the White House." == References ==