ONCE UPON A TIME, THE PEOPLE TASKED with speaking for the president of the United States were not just excellent communicators but also known for their good sense, composure, diplomacy, truthfulness (for the most part, at least), and tact. Think of the late Bill Moyers, who served as press secretary under President Lyndon Johnson. Or James Hagerty, whose work in the role for President Dwight Eisenhower set a standard by which later press secretaries would be judged. The West Wing would later pay homage to this lineage with Allison Janney’s character, C.J. Cregg, who was press secretary and later (improbably) chief of staff for the show’s fictional president, Jed Bartlet.
Now, as with so much else, those norms have been shattered. President Donald Trump’s top-ranking communicators have no place for any of these qualities. Rather they are known for their rashness, haughtiness, vulgarity, mendacity, and pique. They radiate contempt for members of the media who dare to ask tough questions, even obvious ones, and demand subservience in return. Instead of offering perspective, they promote misunderstanding. Instead of encouraging discourse, they deploy invective to shut it down.
Here are some examples involving three of the president’s frontline communicators.
Karoline Leavitt
During a press briefing on May 29, the nation’s youngest-ever White House press secretary (age 27) accused former First Lady Jill Biden of lying to the American people about the declining mental acuity of her husband, President Joe Biden. (Presumably, she meant to contrast Biden’s haziness with the singular sharpness of intellect displayed by her boss, Donald Trump.) According to Leavitt, “anybody looking again at the videos and photo evidence of Joe Biden with their own eyes and a little bit of common sense can see this is a clear coverup, and Jill Biden was certainly complicit in that coverup.” She suggested that Jill Biden should be forced to testify before a Republican-led congressional inquiry.
On July 23, while appearing on a right-wing podcast, Leavitt upped the ante, referring to Joe Biden as having been “a brain-dead president.” She made this comment while taking a shot at her predecessor as White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, whom she alleged “was not good at the job for a lot of reasons” but nonetheless deserved some amount of sympathy for being required to speak on behalf of a guy whose brain had stopped functioning. Leavitt added, “I say that with sincerity in my heart.”
One example of the level of competence Leavitt has brought to the job was presented in March when she attacked a federal judge who ordered a pause to mass deportations under the clearly inapplicable Alien Enemies Act. Leavitt, at a press briefing, railed against Judge James Boasberg, who she said was “a Democrat activist” appointed to the bench by Barack Obama.
As one of the reporters in the room, Garrett Haake of NBC News, felt obliged to point out, Boasberg was actually appointed by President George W. Bush and later elevated to his current position by Obama. “Just feel like I should clear that up,” Haake said. Leavitt felt no such compunction.
Sean Parnell
In March, the Trump administration’s chief Pentagon spokesperson declared that a New York Times report that then-Trump buddy Elon Musk was about to be briefed on possible war scenarios with China as “completely fake.” “The NYT is a propaganda machine that should IMMEDIATELY retract their lies!” he thundered on X in pure Trumpian fashion. A month later, the Wall Street Journal reported that the plan to share highly classified information with Musk was scuttled “after Trump learned about it in the media.”
In early July, when CNN reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not notify the White House before authorizing a pause in U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Parnell fired off an X post calling the story “a complete & total fabrication” perpetrated by “a well established hoaxer.” This, after Trump himself publicly acknowledged his cluelessness about the pause at a cabinet meeting: When asked who ordered it, he replied, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
But Parnell’s crowning entry in the Trump administration’s internal competition for most obnoxious spokesperson behavior came on July 23, when he was asked about the Pentagon inspector general’s finding that Hegseth shared a classified U.S. military document in an unprotected Signal chat earlier this year. Parnell’s response, delivered in a statement, was a master class in arrogance, deflection, raw meanness, and sheer falsity: “This Signal narrative is so old and worn out, it’s starting to resemble Joe Biden’s mental state. The Department stands behind its previous statements: no classified information was shared via Signal.”
Lie. Deny. Attack reporters. Blame former presidents. Sneer.
Check, check, check, check, check.
Steven Cheung
In April, Trump’s director of communications blasted the Daily Beast’s chief content officer, Joanna Coles, for making an inquiry regarding the 79-year-old president’s apparent weight loss. Cheung, in a post on X, called her “a piece of shit, clearly suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain.” Really, he put this in writing.
He often does, apparently. Cheung followed that in May, when he launched an unhinged attack on HuffPost reporter S.V. Date, who had the audacity to ask why most of Trump’s public remarks are not made available on the White House website. “You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent,” Cheung declared. “The president regularly does multiple press engagements per day and they are streamed live on multiple platforms.” In a case of look-who’s-talking irony overload, Cheung went on to urge Date to “Stop beclowning yourself.” Look who’s talking.
Cheung’s disregard for reality was also on full display when he claimed in an X post on June 14, the day of Trump’s military parade debacle, that “over 250,000 patriots showed up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the @USArmy.” The figure, as others were quick to point out, was wildly inaccurate. Photos of the event showed a sparse crowd with lots of space between attendees. Time magazine described the turnout as being in the “tens of thousands.” Trump biographer Michael Wolff put the actual total at “maybe” 40,000, adding that the president expressed disappointment in the low turnout. This prompted Cheung to go after Wolff, which he did by slightly altering the template he’d used to attack Coles. Wolff was, Cheung told the Daily Beast, “a lying sack of shit” who “has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
Meanwhile, on that same June day, an estimated 4 to 6 million Americans took part in “No Kings” protests in more than 2,100 cities and towns across the country. Cheung, for his part, dismissed these much larger protests as “a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance.”
Of course he did. Telling lies like this is what he gets paid to do.
By the way, Cheung, like Leavitt and Parnell, is compensated at executive schedule level 4, which means he is—and they are—paid $195,200 per year. Where’s DOGE when we need it?