As the White House communications department undergoes its snail’s-pace overhaul, another top staffer has left the building.

Special assistant to the president and director of rapid response Steven Cheung’s last day of work was Friday, according to multiple people briefed on his departure. President Donald Trump was abroad along with most of his senior staff, but Cheung's last day still marked a low-key end of an era of sorts: He was one of the last remaining campaign-era Trump aides still working on the White House campus.


Cheung was known as the rare aide in the White House who was often in the room, but kept his head down. Unlike many of his colleagues, he never turned himself into a household name.

“Steven has been a part of Trump world for over 700 days,” said Bryan Lanza, a former Trump campaign aide. “He deserves a gold watch.”

Lanza recalled surviving the 2016 Republican National Convention with Cheung, when the communications staff was still just a shoestring operation trying to figure out Trump’s simultaneously combative and symbiotic relationship to the press in real time.

“There was no on-boarding,” he said. “It was a hurricane that disrupted both of our lives and changed the rules of how we understood the media.”

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If the campaign communications shop had the excitement of a small band of pirates fighting against a tanker that was the Hillary Clinton campaign, it has since transformed into a snake pit turned in against itself. These days, the communications department seems to generate more news about itself and its “leakers” than any other branch of the West Wing, while the president sets his own agenda via his Twitter feed.


Some officials in the press department were not even given a heads-up about Cheung’s departure — finalized in a meeting with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders last week — until their emails started bouncing back on Monday.

White House chief of staff John Kelly has approved plans for cleaning out junior staff in the wake of the embarrassing leak of comments made by aide Kelly Sadler, who said that Trump could ignore Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s opposition to CIA director nominee Gina Haspel because the war hero, who’s been diagnosed with brain cancer, was “dying anyway.”

Sadler became infamous for the episode. She was not, however, fired because of the remark, but in spite of it: Trump was reportedly more incensed by the fact that her comment leaked out of an internal meeting than that she made the comment at all.


“You have a communications team that is, by any measure, very inexperienced,” said Cliff Sims, another campaign-era aide who recently left the West Wing. “Cheung had experience outside of politics at a high level.”

Before joining the Trump campaign, Cheung worked for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He plans to return to life outside of politics in the sports and entertainment industry, according to a person familiar with his plans.

Sims said Cheung was a key behind-the-scenes player on the administration’s most successful wins: the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch and last winter’s passage of a massive tax reform bill. “No one gave more of his heart and soul to the president these past two years,” he said.

Cheung declined to comment for this article. Sanders spoke well of the departing staffer, despite clashes that precipitated his departure.

“Steven Cheung was an early member of the campaign team and has been in the White House from day one,” she said in a statement. “He is well-liked, talented, smart and served this President extremely well. Steven is moving on to take a prominent position in the private sector, and there is no doubt in my mind he'll be greatly successful and certainly missed by the team.”

Cheung’s departure was anticipated by people who know him well, and comes at a time of great turnover in his department.

Counselor Kellyanne Conway, who has assumed a large hand in the White House communications strategy, last week hinted more changes coming to the team — but not, likely, the appointment of a communications director anytime soon to succeed Hope Hicks, who left in February.

“We’re trying to not force ourselves to fit what worked for Obama, Bush or Reagan,” Conway said at a breakfast with reporters last week. “Some people have left recently, we expect others will in the near future ... We’re going to do things differently and creatively with rapid response. We also are beefing up the digital team.”