White House communications director Steven Cheung unleashed a profanity-laced broadside against former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after Pompeo criticized the Trump administration’s emerging deal with Iran — setting off a wave of condemnation from commentators across the political spectrum.
Pompeo had posted that the deal “being floated with Iran seems straight out of the Wendy Sherman-Robert Malley-Ben Rhodes playbook,” warning it would “pay the IRGC to build a WMD program and terrorize the world.” He called it “not remotely America First” and demanded the administration simply “open the damned strait.”
Cheung, a former UFC communications director, fired back with language rarely seen from an official White House spokesman. “Mike Pompeo has no idea what the f— he’s talking about,” Cheung wrote. “He should shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals. He’s not read into anything that’s happening, so how would he know.”
The statement triggered immediate blowback.
“I will never get used to this kind of obscenity being used in an official statement by the White House Communication Director,” wrote attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “The White House no longer aspires to lead from a higher moral vantage point, it seeks to fight in the mud with the pigs.”
Journalist Brett Meiselas appealed directly to the administration’s sense of decorum. “Can you all grow up? You work in the White House. Act like it for once. This shouldn’t be a political thing. Just have some decency, man.”
The spectacle of a Trump aide attacking the man Trump himself chose as his top diplomat drew particular mockery. “Pompeo is so dumb that Cheung’s boss made him Secretary of State for nearly 3 years,” wrote National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru.
The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes was more pointed about the credibility gap on display: “Yeah, take it from a 1980s-born political hatchetman and ex-UFC comms director, Mike Pompeo — top of his class at West Point, Harvard Law grad, House Intel, ex-CIA director, ex-SecState — is clueless about Iran.”
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar summed up the broader reaction in blunt terms: “Is it a sign that things are going well when your spokesperson is posting like a jilted incel 8th grader?”
Mehdi Hasan simply noted the absurdity for the record: “White House comms director to former Trump Secretary of State,” he wrote, quoting Cheung’s statement without further comment.
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic added dryly: “This sounds totally calm.”
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