A White House smear against a legendary actor stemmed from a decades-old grudge and wild jealousy, a Trump biographer said.
During an episode of Inside Trump's Head, host Joanna Coles and Trump biographer Michael Wolff tried to explain the White House's smear campaign against actor Richard Gere.
The smear started when White House Communications Director Steven Cheung responded to Gere's criticism of cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), according to reporting by The Daily Beast. In a post on X, Cheung brought up a rumor from the 1990s about Gere involving a gerbil.
Gere "long since has gotten past that," Wolff said. However, Wolff had been "puzzled" about what would motivate Cheung to "resurrect such a ridiculous thing" and noted that he "is probably even too young to know this," he said, concluding it was Trump who told Cheung to bring it up.
"The president is mad at Richard Gere," Wolff said. "So, Steven Cheung was assigned this job, his daily assassination here."
Coles suggested, "It was just some sort of wild jealousy that is still lodged somewhere in a file in Donald Trump's brain."
Wolff agreed, saying, "That's the way things happen in the White House. It's Donald Trump who was incensed about Richard Gere, something he saw, something someone said, something he has some association with, with Richard Gere."
He continued, explaining, "Richard Gere is handsomer than he is" and "is ultimately in that Hollywood contest, much more successful than Donald Trump ever was."
Gere was also married to supermodel Cindy Crawford, Wolff noted, "as opposed to Donald Trump marrying Melania, who he pretended was a supermodel, but we know, in fact, wasn't really a model of any great note."