In the early hours of the morning, Air Force One hurtled across the Pacific Ocean toward Anchorage. There it would refuel before taking off again for the final destination of Joint Base Andrews. The president and his staff were returning from a whirlwind swing through Asia that featured meetings with China’s president Xi Jinping and Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi, as well as the presentation of one very large gold crown.
On Air Force One, somewhere above Alaska, White House communications director Steven Cheung gazed out at the Northern Lights. A brilliant streak of emerald cut across the night sky. He posted a photo on X: “BEAUTIFUL!” Nine minutes later, he posted another tweet.
“Didn’t you get fired from CNN for banging a source?”
Cheung was responding to a journalist who had criticized a pro-Trump commentator on X. Moments before, Cheung had called a former Trump official “a loser” with “no pull, no juice, no stroke.” A few hours later, he bashed the “failing New York Times” and accused a reporter of having “Beta cuck vibes.”
That burst of belligerence is par for the course from Donald Trump’s second-term communications team, which has evolved from the 2024 campaign to be more polemical, more trollish, and more online than ever before. “It’s the Barstoolification of the White House press shop,” one White House reporter tells me. In his second term, Trump finally has a media team that operates as a pure extension of his own id. “They see this as a campaign,” the reporter says. “It’s what the boss wants. It’s what the base wants.”
But behind the scenes, Trump’s team has maintained a professional and oftentimes helpful relationship with the press under the leadership of Karoline Leavitt, the young and ambitious press secretary who announced her imminent departure earlier this month. When she leaves, the administration will lose the official who made its peculiar relationship with the press work.
Not that Leavitt was ever a peacemaker in the conventional sense. She helped turn the White House podium into another front in Trump’s war on the media, ridiculing reporters and defending restrictions on their access. But she also became the administration’s indispensable broker with the same journalists, close enough to Trump to know what was happening and trusted enough on both sides to prevent routine hostilities from devolving into chaos. Now Cheung will become the West Wing’s most prominent communications official. It’s a prospect that some in the White House press corps are dreading.
Puerile combat has defined Cheung’s performance in the second term. He used to regularly post CNN’s ratings to mock the network, to the point that I’m told a CNN executive called him to ask that he stop. Last fall, Cheung told a New Yorker writer to “shut the fuck up.” After a White House official joked on X that liberal influencer Harry Sisson should receive a spanking, Cheung wrote that Sisson “might actually like that” because he’s a “sick freak.” When people expressed concern about the 250-foot triumphal arch Trump wants to build in Washington, Cheung suggested they had small penises. Last week, he called a former House Republican a “dildo.”
