Dear Steven

Teen advice from Donald Trump spokesman Steven Cheung

Oct 29, 2024

We have one week until we elect a president, and I’m already exhausted. Like all of you, I’ve clicked on the polls, listened to the punditry, stared out the window, doom-scrolled at 4 am, remembered how it felt to watch the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, recalled that a sitting U.S. president actually tossed out paper towels to hurricane victims. I grew up in a diehard Republican household in a Republican state, but I just fail to understand this conservative movement to “own the libs.” The act of saying crazy things to wind up a liberal? That’s not hard at all. You’re not exactly ascending the Mountain of Cleverness. It doesn’t make you any smarter, you’re just picking some low-hanging fruit. You don’t “own” anything. People on both sides of politics read my stuff, and this is a scenario I’d like to share, that’s worth considering before you vote.

My dad grew up in bigoted Texas during the Depression. He voted Democrat most of his early life. That generation was all in for FDR, and later, Harry Truman. He definitely voted for JFK, and it wasn’t until LBJ became president that he, like so many others in the South, turned into a proud Republican. Over his workbench hung a large poster of Ronald Reagan, wearing a cowboy hat. Every GOP candidate that followed, he was all in: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and II. And yes, we sometimes argued. I scored a tiny victory the moment Oliver North was pardoned, when I screamed at the television—I probably said something like “Are you fucking kidding me?”—and he tossed the TV remote into his chair and left the room. But one day, late in his life, he told me that he voted for Obama. I was genuinely stunned. I asked him why, and he said, “Oh, I like him. I like what he says.” I don’t have any grand conclusion to this story, other than to remind all of us that party affiliations can be fluid, and elections are often determined by what a candidate says.

I wrote the following piece a few months ago, and it seems time to share it now. Donald Trump election campaign spokesman Steven Cheung would not dispute these descriptions of himself: coarse, crass, pugilistic, calculated, shocking, unhinged, insulting, performative, a foul-mouthed bully. A former communications director for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, he regularly attacks opponents on Twitter/X, and is the media’s go-to soundbite for reactions/denials from Trumpworld. In the short-sighted stupidity of divisive political rhetoric, he gleefully places himself at the tip of the spear. Recent profiles in The New Yorker and Mother Jones, however, have neglected to mention Cheung’s very interesting side project: an advice column for teens. What follows is a short one-act play based on this hypothetical advice column. All questions are real, all answers are verbatim quotes.

(Steven Cheung sits on a stool at one side of the stage. Another stool is placed on the other side, where each child takes the stool to ask their question. Lights come up and black out to follow each speaker’s lines. NOTE: the roles of the teenagers must be played by actual teenagers.)