White House’s Top Trollmonger Resurfaces Vile Claim About Richard Gere For Speaking Out Against the Admin
Steven Cheung is one of the administration’s most scurrilous characters, known for rumormongering and pulling disgusting insults that hit every problematic button under the sun.
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The sun’s getting hotter, the days are getting longer—and my childhood crush, Richard Gere, is ramping up his criticism of the Trump administration. (Say what you will; Shall We Dance? changed my life.) And clearly, the ’80s It Man is getting under the administration’s skin, because on Monday White House Communications Director Steven Cheung snapped back with… slander. Yep. Because that’s totally how the old adage goes: When they go high, go lower than hell.
“Sorry, not going to listen to a guy that may have put a gerbil up his ass,” Cheung reply-tweeted to a clip of Gere criticizing the administration’s cuts to foreign aid at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway in June—resurfacing a vile and falsified conspiracy theory that the actor once had to go to the emergency room to remove a gerbil from his butt. Gere himself has called the story an “urban myth” and “waste of energy”—both of which could also be used to describe much of the administration’s approach to truth.
Specifically, Gere’s comments were targeted at the administration’s sweeping cuts to U.S. aid, its cruel deportation campaign, and its soft approach to Israel’s war crimes. Soundbites have since resurfaced of this interview—such as the clip that pissed off Cheung. “USAID was probably the most pure thing America did up to that moment,” Gere had said. “It was a giveaway program to needy people. He stopped that day one. It was insane. He wouldn’t even know what it stands for, USAID. He has idiots around him who have the same ignorance about it.” You tell ’em, Richard.
Sorry, not going to listen to a guy that may have put a gerbil up his ass. https://t.co/UesBakLsYX pic.twitter.com/ly4B894lZH
— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47) July 20, 2026
Gere has been re-gracing the headlines recently for also slamming Trump as a “rogue personality who’s destroyed so much” during a media press junket to promote his new show, The Agency. “He is an old man; he’s a damaged personality. You can see he must have had horrible childhood to be the man that he is now,” he said. “He’s hurt so many people, and he has caused so many deaths. But it will be over.”
All of which is, honestly, cold-hard fact. Considering development assistance alone, in the last 19 months, the U.S. has self-rationalized burning 500 tons of food aid because of sweeping funding cuts; vanished about $10 million worth of birth control; and cost about 1 million women and girls access to aid. These are just a few examples.
But Cheung is one of the administration’s most scurrilous characters, known for rumormongering and pulling disgusting insults that hit every problematic button under the sun. Most infamously, in February, he lost his shit at Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) after they pushed the Justice Department to release more files on Epstein, tweet-calling them “the dumbest retards ever to be in Congress.” He lobbed a similar insult at a female Senate aide, and called also Jimmy Kimmel a “shit human being.” I’d say I see a bigger contender for shit human being…
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