Minutes after CNN and The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a US intelligence report had determined the US military strike on Iran had done limited damage to its nuclear facilities, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt didn’t just push back. She unloaded.

“FAKE NEWS CNN STRIKES AGAIN,” Leavitt posted on X to her 1.3 million followers. She then added a second post noting that one of the lead reporters on CNN’s story, Natasha Bertrand, had also written a Politico story in 2020 in which former intelligence officials raised concerns that Hunter Biden’s laptop was part of a Russian disinformation plot. “How did that work out for you, @NatashaBertrand?” sneered Leavitt.

As aggressive as Leavitt’s response was, it was positively subtle compared to the one HuffPost reporter S.V. Date got from the White House last month. After he asked communications director Steven Cheung why transcripts of many of President Donald Trump’s public remarks had not been posted on the White House website, Cheung lowered the boom: “You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent,” he told Date in a statement. “We’ve even granted low-level outlets like HuffPo additional access to events, because we’re so transparent. For anyone to think otherwise proves they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.” His parting admonition: “Stop beclowning yourself.”

President Trump’s public hostility toward the news media includes filing a dubious lawsuit against CBS News parent Paramount over how the network edited a Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview, banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office, and seeking the end of federal funding for PBS, NPR, and Voice of America. But Trump’s anti-media disdain plays out in smaller ways via his press shop, which often turns reporters’ requests for comment into opportunities to unleash withering streams of crude insults and insinuations.

Cheung is the most aggressive of Trump’s press staffers, and the architect of the weaponized comms. After serving as the chief spokesman during the 2024 campaign, Cheung was appointed by Trump to oversee White House communication. A former spokesman for the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a self-described “pro-wrestling historian,” Cheung is a regular practitioner of the verbal smackdown. Merely providing the White House’s take on an issue usually isn’t enough; Cheung often garnishes his public replies with a rancid cherry. After Daily Beast editor Joanna Coles went on CNN and raised questions about Trump’s weight loss in April, for example, Cheung took to X and called her a “blithering idiot” who was “suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain.”

Back in March, when journalist Tara Palmeri wrote on Substack about Elon Musk’s fraying relationship with the Trump White House, Cheung had a blunt response: “These sources are full of shit and have no idea what they’re talking about.” Palmeri’s sources, in fact, provided an early preview of the eventual Trump-Musk blowup.

On his official White House X feed, Cheung has referred to various political adversaries and reporters as a “cuck,” “dumbass,” “dummy” and “a dick.” He also posted last month that former FBI director James Comey “might be one of the dumbest motherf—-ers in human history.”

Leavitt, the press secretary, tends to refrain from such coarse responses during televised briefings, but she can be scathing too, once the cameras are off. In an X post in February, she trashed New York Times reporter Peter Baker after he compared the AP’s Oval Office ban and the White House’s seizure of the press pool to Vladimir Putin’s tactics in the Kremlin. “Gone are the days where left-wing stenographers posing as journalists, such as yourself, dictate who gets to ask what,” Leavitt snapped.

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.”

In a brief exchange of emails, Cheung suggested his communications style was a bold and refreshingly honest break from the official White House–speak of yore. “We speak directly and clearly, untethered by traditional and outdated mores of politics often cloaked in trite responses that do not serve the American public well,” he wrote. “The press knows exactly where we stand and if you ask any reporter across the ideological spectrum, most will tell you they have great relationships with all of us.”

Well, “great” may not be the most apt term. Date, the HuffPost reporter, called Cheung’s retorts “puerile” and the stuff of “a fourth-grader on the playground” in an interview. “Their objective is to insult the reporter and trash the [news] outlet rather than provide accurate information,” he told me. The larger issue, he noted, is how the insults allow the flacks to evade the questions reporters have raised. “I’ve asked them to refute any of the facts I’ve reported, and they’ve been unable to do that,” he said.

In direct personal interactions and in background comments, Cheung can be pleasant and helpful, Palmeri and other journalists said. But for public consumption—or maybe just for Trump—he adopts the persona of an avenging, foul-mouthed avatar. It’s an act, Palmeri says, “a machismo thing. I don’t take it personally…. This is who they are and how they choose to speak. That’s their choice. Their goal is to slam, dunk on, and ‘own’ the media. It feels like we’re being dragged into a reality show we didn’t sign up for.”