A White House aide responded to a request for comment from The Daily Beast by describing one of its podcast hosts with a slur.
In a Friday article about the "vile" slur, The Daily Beast reported that White House Communications Director Steven Cheung lashed out at Joanna Coles, who co-hosts Inside Trump's Head with biographer Michael Wolff. The Daily Beast had reached out to Cheung for a comment on a story about outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
According to The Daily Beast's reporting, Cheung wrote, "Joanna Coles is a r— who has no idea what goes on in the White House." Cheung didn't respond when The Daily Beast reached back out to let him know it would be writing a story about his response.
The Daily Beast reached out to the White House for a comment on a podcast episode hosted by Coles and Executive Editor Hugh Dougherty in which they discussed the departure of Leavitt and other West Wing staffers, including the White House counsel, the deputy national security adviser, and one of Leavitt's deputy press secretaries.
"There's two elements to this story. There's the personal, and there's, I think, if you want to call it the institutional," Dougherty said. "And it's no doubt about the personal here. Karoline Leavitt was not enjoying herself."
Dougherty noted that Leavitt didn't accompany President Donald Trump to Turkey for the NATO summit, which served as the backdrop for the now widely reported decoy plane story. He said Leavitt's absence "raised a few eyebrows with people that she had come back after just a month, and people kind of assumed she would be on this trip."
Explaining the institutional element, Dougherty said, "Look at the timing of this. We are inside the 90-day stretch to the midterms. It's when, once we tick past Labor Day, then really the whole country is going to be focused on what happens on November the 3rd, and we know what's going to happen."
Dougherty explained, "If the polls are right, it's going to be a blue wave that's going to be so unpleasant if you are in the West Wing, if you are Karoline Leavitt, if you are the other people who are leaving."
The Daily Beast noted that Cheung also attacked Coles in April, when she questioned Trump's alleged weight loss. Cheung wrote on X that Coles was "a piece of s—, clearly suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain." Coles clapped back by calling out Cheung for using recycled statements.