Baker, who has covered every president since Bill Clinton, told me the exchange was typical. “The automatic response to any inquiry now [is] to insult the reporter and malign the news organization, often ad hominem and often without addressing the substance of the inquiry,” he said. “That wasn’t such a routine in [Trump’s] first term. It seems to be a policy in the second.”
The in-your-face approach trickles down to junior staffers, too. After a lawyer erroneously wrote that air-traffic controllers were subject to a hiring freeze following a deadly plane crash in January, White House press aide Alex Pfeiffer ripped him as a “lying hack” on X. (Pfeiffer, formerly Tucker Carlson’s producer at Fox News, used equally colorful language to describe his contempt for Trump’s advisers and supporters and their claims of election fraud in the wake of the 2020 election. According to emails made public in 2023 in Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit against Fox, Pfeiffer called Trump lawyer Sidney Powell “a fucking nutcase,” and described Trump’s most loyal supporters as “cousin f—ker types.”)
Another deputy, Anna Kelly, gave an earful to New York Times reporter Minho Kim earlier this month after Kim asked the White House for comment about the ethics of corporations advertising their products as part of the Army’s 250th anniversary parade. Kelly skipped any factual or substantive response and went straight to the accusations. The Times, she told Kim in a statement, was “pining to insult” the Army. She further suggested that Kim’s story dishonored those who gave their lives in battle.
The resort to invective isn’t just a change from the mannered and measured official pronouncements of previous administrations; it’s a change even from the standards of Trump 1.0. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, Jahan Wilcox, told a reporter she was “a piece of trash.” Such outbursts were unusual then. The bar is lower now, mainly because the administration has made such invective commonplace.
The White House’s sniping is often delivered via two official but otherwise anonymous social media accounts, Rapid Response 47 and DOD Rapid Response, the latter emanating from the Pentagon. The accounts routinely denounce and label news stories critical of the administration as “fake news,” which so far includes reporting by ABC News, The Atlantic, the BBC, CBS News, CNN, Financial Times, NBC News, The New York Times, NPR, Reuters, USA Today, and The Washington Post, among others. Notably, the reporting of Trump-friendly outlets seems to have escaped nearly all notice.
Cheung vents at journalists so often that he has to recycle some of his more piquant insults, such as describing critics as “beclowning” themselves, possessing “a pea- (or peanut-) sized brain” or suffering from “a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” He’s applied the latter term to Coles, CNN anchor Erin Burnett, the Associated Press, The Washington Post, Harvard professor emeritus Laurence Tribe, former Trump advisers John Bolton and John Kelly, MSNBC commentator Barbara McQuade, journalist Bob Woodward, and former Republican candidate Nikki Haley, among others. Author Michael Wolff, who has written several books critical of Trump, hit the daily double in February: Cheung called Wolff “a lying sack of shit” who has “a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
