Daily Kos83%
Trump’s vile attack dog gets nasty about USAID cuts 84%
By Alix Breeden76%
7/21/2026, 8:30:00 PM
Topics: US Politics, Foreign Policy
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Ad Hominem, Negativity Bias, and Anecdotal, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 36.9% saturation with 220 hits. Analysis detected 1,113 faulty-reasoning hits from 596 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 76.2% and a BS Rank of 84% (3,220 of 19,489 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 83.50% of the article peer group.
When in doubt, deflect it out—at least, that’s how White House communications director Steven Cheung seems to be operating.
President Donald Trump’s notorious attack dog decided Monday that the best course of action to take when actor Richard Gere criticized the president was to … push a tawdry, decades-old sexual conspiracy theory.
“Sorry, not going to listen to a guy that may have put a gerbil up his ass,” the 44-year-old tweeted.
Cheung was responding to an interview given by the “Pretty Woman” star, who criticized Trump and his buddy Elon Musk's decision to gut the United States Agency for International Development, known as USAID.
“USAID was probably the most pure thing America did up to that moment,” Gere said in an interview with the Associated Press.
“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.”
Gere’s alleged “gerbilectomy,” the made-up medical term for the also made-up sexual kink, was widely debunked and cast aside as another outlandish rumor that circulated in the 1980s.
But that didn’t stop Cheung from tossing around fake news instead of addressing the widespread disdain in the wake of the U.S. pulling international aid.
Gere isn’t in a vacuum on this one.
The actor’s belief that the president killed a life-saving program impacting countries in need is widely shared.
Life-saving food supplies have been incinerated due to the government’s decisions.
Medication and vaccines once distributed to communities in need have ceased.
Related | Inside the Trump administration’s man-made hunger crisis
According to the Harvard School of Public Health, these cuts have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Doctors Without Borders—a nonprofit agency that does not accept any government aid— called out the direct impacts that its physician volunteers were already seeing on the ground in late 2025.
“When food aid is cut, our malnutrition treatment programs fill up.
When vaccines go undelivered, our teams face the consequences when we respond to disease outbreaks,” they wrote in a November 2025 press release.
“Our teams are seeing the impacts on the ground: vaccination campaigns disrupted, clinics closed, medications out of stock, drinking water in short supply, or doctors unable to tell their patients how to continue their treatment.”
If you ask the Trump administration, they will tell you that no one has died.
But the picture is more complicated than that.
When the U.S. cut off aid, it disrupted supply chains and shattered community trust that took time to build in the first place.
With that in mind, Cheung’s deflective and defensive response to a celebrity calling out yet another Trump misstep makes sense.
Instead of offering a solution or admitting to any mistakes, Trump’s White House has historically redirected blame and attention elsewhere.
This isn’t the first time Cheung has stooped to childish attacks.
In October 2025, he and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt decided that instead of responding to a reporter’s question, they would fling insults instead and literally resort to “Your mom” retorts.
And as The Daily Beast reported, “In 2026 alone, Cheung has called a Senate aide a ‘r—d,’ derided Stephen Colbert as an ‘entitled p—k,’ and insulted Jimmy Kimmel as a ‘s—t human being.’
Gere’s interview did highlight one incontrovertible fact: Trump isn’t presiding over this mess alone.
As the actor and humanitarian eloquently put it, the president “has idiots around him who have the same ignorance about it.”
Analysis
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