President Donald Trump has bestowed a telling moniker on his foul-mouthed attack dog Steven Cheung.
The president’s communications director has made a name for himself by hurling vulgar broadsides at everyone from lawmakers in Congress to journalists at the Daily Beast, while routinely melting down at Trump’s critics on social media.
Trump, 80, has apparently embraced Cheung’s volatile streak and refers to the physically imposing aide as Luca Brasi, Vito Corleone’s hitman in The Godfather, according to Regime Change, the forthcoming book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
The president also describes Cheung, the son of Chinese immigrants, as “a more violent version of Kim Jong Un,” the North Korean dictator running one of the world’s most repressive regimes, according to the Daily Beast’s founding editor, Tina Brown, who obtained the book and wrote about it on her Fresh Hell Substack.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 classic, which Trump counts among his favorite films, Brasi is Don Corleone’s remorseless, fiercely loyal personal enforcer who ultimately dies a brutal death. Trump’s nickname for Cheung suggests that the president, in turn, sees himself as the aging crime family patriarch portrayed by Marlon Brando
Like Brasi, Trump’s comparison of Cheung to Kim is not strictly pejorative; the president has often spoken warmly of the missile-obsessed despot, saying in 2018 that the two of them “fell in love” through their letter exchanges.
Both Brasi and Kim are heavier-set like Cheung, whom Trump has referred to as his “sumo wrestler” and outed as a GLP-1 drug user.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This year alone, Cheung has dropped the abelist slur “r----d” on a female Senate aide, described Jimmy Kimmel as a “s--t human,” and called Stephen Colbert an “entitled p---k.”
The communications chief, who oversees the White House’s digital team that produces a steady stream of incendiary memes, has also called Joanna Coles, the Daily Beast’s chief content officer, a “blithering idiot,” and Michael Wolff, co-host of the Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head podcast, a “lying sack of s--t.”
According to Brown’s Substack, Cheung is described in Regime Change as “an astonishing sight roaming through the West Wing: physically enormous, with a low brow, a shaved head, great slablike hands, and an omnipresent sneer.”
Wolff, who was granted access to the White House during the first Trump administration when Cheung served as an assistant communications director, said on The Daily Beast Podcast last year that Cheung is “hidden away” by the White House and cannot rise to become White House press secretary because that role is reserved for a “young woman” in Trumpworld.
“Whatever Steven says or does is directed to an audience of one,” Wolff said. “He issues these kinds of vituperative comments, which Trump likes. ‘That’s a good one,’ Trump will say.”
According to Regime Change, Cheung took satisfaction in seeing Democratic figures like California Governor Gavin Newsom adopt Trump-style trolling and online attacks, telling his colleagues it would make Newsom “unelectable” in 2028.
