Disney fans horrified to find childhood icon working closely with Donald Trump
Many fans of former Disney Channel actress Caroline Sunshine are shocked to see her latest role is a lot more controversial, to say the least.
Sunshine, 28, shot to fame as a teenager, starring alongside Zendaya and Bella Thorne in the 2010 series Shake It Up.
The American actress is still on the screen – but these days she’s promoting and defending ex-President Donald Trump amid his campaign to regain the White House.
It’s come as a huge surprise to millions of Sunshine’s fans.
‘In a truly wtf moment I just learned that the actress who played the evil Eastern European exchange student in the Disney channel show Shake It Up, opposite Zendaya, is now Trump’s deputy comms director,’ wrote the X (formerly Twitter) account @OrganizerMemes on Monday night.
The post included a screenshot of Sunshine as Tinka Hessenheffern from Shake It Up, juxtaposed with her X account stating, ‘Deputy Director of Communications, Donald J. Trump for President’ and ‘Come and take it.’
It had more than 2.7million views, 27,000 likes and 2,000 reposts by late afternoon Tuesday.
‘That was not the turn of events I was expecting??? HOW DID SHE EVEN GET FROM HERE TO THERE??’ wrote one X user.
Another X user remarked: ‘Wow guess you could say that she….. shook it up.’
‘Yeah it’s all show business,’ replied an X user.
Another X user wrote: ‘I’m currently rewatching shake it up and every time she’s on my screen I can’t help but wonder why??? Like she could’ve had a pretty decent acting career.’
In one of her most recent TV appearances, Sunshine touted Trump’s performance in the first 2024 debate that was a disaster for Biden and has led to calls from within his own party for him to drop out of the race.
Wearing a fuchsia suit complimenting her blonde locks, Sunshine told Fox News that Americans who watched the debate ‘wish that the election was today and that they could cast their vote for Donald J Trump and get Joe Biden out of the Oval Office immediately’.
‘I do not think the American people are worried about four more years of Joe Biden – I think they are worried about four more months of Joe Biden, as is the Democrat Party,’ she said in an articulate and serious manner last week.
‘I will tell you the conversations that our campaign is having could not be more different from the panic and disarray of the Democrats.
‘We couldn’t be prouder to have President Trump as our nominee. He has unified and inspired our party.’
Sunshine added that the Trump campaign is fielding endless speculation of who Trump’s vice presidential running mate will be, ‘rather than taking on if the VP nominees is going to have to replace our nominee’, referring to rumors of Vice President Kamala Harris replacing Biden.
While Sunshine’s role as Trump’s flack may be news to many of her Disney fans, she joined his camp long ago.
At 22 years old, she was one of the youngest staff members to be hired by the Trump administration. She is also understood to be the first actor to serve in the West Wing since the Reagan administration.
Sunshine has not shied away from addressing how cancel culture came for her.
‘I think that probably like everyone elsewhere I’m going through a transition,’ Sunshine told the Independent Women’s Forum in February 2021.
‘I am dealing with some of the effects of cancel culture, as we’ll get into, are long and lingering, and I think that’s one of the very cruel things about cancel culture is that usually its victims are left with some long-term damage from it because everybody else moves on.’
Sunshine revealed that she was in college when she saw in Trump as ‘someone who had a very powerful message’ and applied not once, but twice for a White House internship.
‘I ended up becoming a White House intern in the press and communications office,’ she said.
More than four years later, Sunshine is even deeper in the trenches with Trump than ever before.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.