Steven Cheung Is Trump’s Media Sumo Wrestler
By J. J. Ghosh | 19 Mar, 2026

The California-raised son of Chinese immigrants is shattering Asian American stereotypes as the most combative White House Communications Director ever.

Decisions are made by those who show up,” fictional White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler once declared in NBC’s The West Wing, a show about an idealistic team of White House staffers who believed in the government’s capacity to serve the American people.

In contrast, here are some public statements from Steven Cheung, the current real life White House Communications Director.

WH Communications Director Steven Cheung

“Jimmy Kimmel (Mr. Blackface) is a classless hack who is self-projecting his depression and sadness onto others.  He lives a pathetic existence where nobody — not even his family — enjoys his miserable company,” real life White House Communications Director Steve Cheung posted on X last week.

“You must be truly f***ing stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”

“Joanna is a piece of s***, clearly suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain.”

Anyone surprised that Donald Trump’s chief messenger would speak in the same vulgar style as the President has clearly not been paying attention for the past 10 years.

What’s particularly surprising to me, however, is not that Trump would hire someone like Cheung.  It’s a question of how Cheung came to be the way he is today.

And upon taking a look into his background, I’m no less perplexed.

Upbringing

Steven Cheung — born Huyen Cheung in 1982 —is the son of immigrants who came here from Hong Kong.  His mother was raised in Japan.  

Cheung grew up in Sacramento, California and attended John F. Kennedy High School, which shockingly has not yet been renamed to Trump-Kennedy High.

He reportedly played football, and by most accounts was a perfectly ordinary kid from a working-class immigrant family in California's Central Valley.

Cheung attended California State University Sacramento, majoring in computer science and political science, but did not earn a degree, which is in some ways consistent with the White House’s ongoing attacks on academia, intellectualism, and a perceived liberal campus ideology.

As far as anyone can tell, he wasn’t raised to believe racist right-wing authoritarian ideology.

It does in fact seem like he was a Republican from an early age given his internship with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in college and, in 2008, John McCain’s presidential campaign.

In some ways, these jobs make sense: While Arnold “The Governator” Schwarzenegger was seen as a moderate, the mere fact that he had won the Governorship of one of the bluest states in the country made working for him a boon to any conservative coming up in politics at the time.

In recent years, Schwarzenegger has almost exclusively supported Democrats.

Working for John McCain seems a bit more jarring given that Trump has more or les split the Republican party into those who admire and respect McCain and those, like himself, who are on record relentlessly mocking McCain even after his passing.  The latter camp won out. 

Again, it seems odd that the ideology of both a Trump and McCain supporter might overlap, but working for McCain at the time provided any staffer a viable path to working in the White House.

Ultimately, I think that the McCain to Trump path can tell us one of the following about Cheung:

His political views have evolved or he doesn’t actually have a core set of beliefs and will do anything for power.

Or maybe it’s a combination. 

Finding His Person

Interesting, but not necessarily surprising is the fact that in 2013, Cheung was named director of communications for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. 

In retrospect, this turns out to have been an almost perfect training ground for what he would do next. 

Bryan Lanza, a colleague from the later Trump campaign, described the role and what it revealed about Cheung’s approach: “Cheung is the ultimate capo, right?  Like if this was a mafia organization, he just does the job and does it quietly.” 

The UFC, under Trump ally Dana White, operated with a specific ethos — aggressive, confrontational, and utterly indifferent to conventional niceties.  Cheung fit right in.  His tenure there included banning reporters who wrote critically about the organization, a tactic that would prove entirely portable.

In July 2016, Cheung joined Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as director of rapid response. 

Something clicked.

Steve Bannon, who has twice hired Cheung as a consultant and considers him a close ally, told Notus: 

Trump’s orbit has long included people who are “high on big personality, low on competence, and lower on hard work.”

 Cheung, Bannon said, is “the exact opposite.  He’s supremely, supremely competent.  He’s also probably the hardest worker in all of Trumpland.”

After Trump’s 2016 victory, Cheung was appointed White House assistant communications director, later becoming director of strategic response.  He was reportedly instrumental in ensuring Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court confirmation and the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  He was fired by Chief of Staff John Kelly in June 2018 — Kelly being one of the few people in Trump’s orbit who attempted to impose order on the chaos.  Cheung was not particularly compatible with order.

He spent the next few years in the wilderness of Republican politics — consulting for Trump’s 2020 campaign, briefly joining Caitlyn Jenner’s improbable California gubernatorial bid, working for MAGA Inc. — before returning as Trump’s primary campaign spokesman for 2024.  By then, the Republican Party had fully completed its transformation, and Cheung had completed his own along with it.  His go-to approach, as Notus described it, was to “double down on what the president is pushing rather than trying to steer him in a new direction.”  

One Republican who worked with him put it bluntly: “He’s going to be one of the last few guys in the bunker with Trump at the end of the day … barring the door with a suicide vest.”

The Voice of the United States Government

In November 2024 Trump named Cheung his White House communications director.  The receipts, as they say, are extensive.

I won’t belabor the point by sharing a gratuitous number of quotes that share the same sentiment as those up top.

But his personal communication style is more or less in lockstep with that of Trump, who has consistently attacked his foes on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, and nearly any other personal characteristic.

In just the past few months, he mocked the horrific murder of liberal filmmaker Rob Reiner, whose murder at the hands of his own son the President blamed on “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

And in just the past month, Trump posted an image that depicts the faces of former President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama on the bodies of apes.

What makes all of this even more remarkable is that the vulgarity and provocation are no longer confined to Trump’s personal accounts or his communications director’s X feed. They have migrated into the official apparatus of the United States government — and what’s been posted from those accounts would have ended careers in any previous administration.

On Valentine’s Day, the official White House X, Instagram, and Facebook accounts posted a meme that read: “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you” — accompanied by the faces of Trump and border czar Tom Homan against a pink background.  The Congressional Hispanic Caucus responded: “You may not take your job seriously, but we do.”

The official White House account used AI to recreate a photograph of a Dominican woman crying during her immigration arrest in the animation style of Studio Ghibli. Another post captioned footage of immigrants boarding planes in handcuffs and chains: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” The official DHS account posted an AI-generated image of alligators wearing ICE caps, captioned “Coming soon!” to promote the opening of a detention facility state Republicans had nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

More troubling than the trolling is what experts say lurks beneath it.  The official White House account posted an image of sled dogs with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” — a phrase that scholars of white nationalism immediately recognized as a reference to extremist rhetoric.  The DHS account had used nearly identical language months earlier, captioning an Uncle Sam recruitment graphic “Which way, American man?” — an echo of a racist, antisemitic book titled Which Way Western Man?   “It’s very much signaling to a lot of these white nationalist groups that their policy goals are being actualized,” said Caleb Kieffer, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

And then there’s the intellectual property.  DHS used Olivia Rodrigo’s song “All-American Bitch” to promote ICE, prompting Rodrigo to respond: “don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.”  Sabrina Carpenter called the White House’s use of her song “Juno” in a pro-ICE video “evil and disgusting.”  SZA accused the White House of “rage baiting artists for free promo.”  Even Theo Von — who interviewed Trump and attended his inauguration — asked DHS to take down a viral clip of him saying “Heard you got deported, dude, bye!” adding: “I know you know my address so send a check.”

To mark six months of Trump’s second term, the White House promised its followers three things would continue: “the winning, the deportations, and the memes.” 

When asked whether any of this concerned him, Cheung was characteristically unbothered. 

“Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes,” the official White House account declared.  Cheung elaborated from his personal account: “A lot of reporters and liberals love to pearl clutch, making being offended part of their entire existence.”

The line between the official communications of the United States government and the personal grievances of the men running it has not merely blurred.  It has effectively ceased to exist.  That is, in no small part, Steven Cheung’s legacy — and his design.

The Elephant in the Room

Days after President Trump shockingly told a reporter aboard Air Force One to “Shut up, piggy,” CA Governor Gavin Newsom—who famously tweets in a style parodying Trump —used the same words to respond to a Tweet by Cheung.

While Newsom may claim that it was an impersonal barb meant only to mock the President, it was hardly lost on any observers that calling Cheung a pig seemed intentional.

Cheung is, after all, a very large man, referred to by the President as a “sumo wrestler”, likely an allusion not only to his appearance but his willingness to consistently put everything he has into a fight. 

I understand and respect that some may deem it inappropriate to comment on his —or anyone’s — physical appearance.  At the same time, his appearance is striking at least in part due to the fact that so few Asians are overweight.  East Asians, after all, have the lowest prevalence of obesity.

While 42% of White Americans, 44% of Hispanics, and 50% of Blacks are obese, that number is just 17% for Asian Americans.

His appearance, much like his politics, again dispel a pre-conceived notion that we might have had for someone of his background. 

Taken together, the various characteristics tell the story of a singularly unique individual.

It would be easy — and not entirely wrong — to write Cheung off as simply a mercenary who found the highest bidder and went all in.  Politics is full of people like that.

But Cheung’s story is worth sitting with for a moment, particularly for those of us in the AAPI community.  Here is the son of Hong Kong immigrants — people who came to America for the freedoms it offered — now serving as the communications architect for an administration that has targeted immigrants, gutted DEI programs, turned federal agencies into instruments of political retribution, and pursued policies that have made life measurably harder for communities of color across the country.

None of that is to say that Asian Americans are obligated to vote or think any particular way.  They aren’t.  The community is not a monolith and never has been.  But there is something specifically worth noting about a man whose entire professional identity is built around aggressive, scorched-earth combat on behalf of a movement that has repeatedly demonstrated hostility toward people who look like him and came from places like where his parents came from.

Whether Cheung has thought about that is something only he can answer.  What’s clear is that he has found, in Trump’s orbit, a place where his particular talents are not just tolerated but celebrated.  A cage fighter’s approach to political communications.  An instinct for the jugular.  A willingness to say things that no previous White House communications director would have said out loud, let alone posted on official government accounts.

Toby Ziegler believed that decisions are made by those who show up.

Steven Cheung showed up.  Make of it what you will.