A behind the scenes portrait of White House communications director Steven Cheung revealed a much softer exterior lies beneath the aide known as President Donald Trump’s “attack dog.”
That’s according to The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey, who wrote in a Monday report that while Cheung has ushered in “a new tone” for the White House as he aggressively trolls Trump’s enemies online, his reputation isn’t exactly what it seems.
“The paradox of Cheung is that, behind the scenes, the president’s attack dog is friendly, and peppers his conversations with generous belly laughs and the occasional ‘hoo boy,’” Godfrey wrote. “In interviews, nearly a dozen reporters from outlets across the ideological spectrum described him to me as a uniquely pleasant and straightforward aide in Trump's mostly toxic orbit.”
The Atlantic staff writer added that even after hearing about his “nice guy” reputation, she was still “surprised by Cheung’s soft-spokenness and plastic-rimmed Tina Fey glasses—a very thoughtful look for a henchman.”
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“The Cheungian approach to communications leans deep into this paradox,” she wrote Monday. “He will engage journalists in pleasant chitchat, argue good-naturedly about the finer points of a story, and then fire off a public insult. ‘These sources are full of s--- and have no idea what they are talking about,’ Cheung said in a story by the journalist Tara Palmeri, who writes the ‘Red Letter Substack.’ But Palmeri described Cheung to me as generally calm and reasonable.”
The “publicly rude, privately nice dynamic” is well-known to most reporters who cover Trump, Godfrey added.
“He’s like a giant teddy bear,” a former White House correspondent who requested anonymity over fears she would face online attacks from Cheung, told the journalist.
But Cheung relishes in the “shock-and-awe style that has come to define communication in the second Trump era,” which Godfrey added, “seems to draw no distinction between aggressive trolling of political opponents and outright cruelty to other human beings.”
Godfrey concluded to readers that Cheung “sounded proud” of the millions of likes and engagements across social media that came from a White House video he approved of people in leg restraints and handcuffs being loaded onto a plane as part of a deportation operation.
