{"id":225760,"date":"2026-09-27T19:33:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T19:33:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/bad-language-profane-trump-brings-presidential-swearing-out-into-open-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T19:33:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T19:33:14","slug":"bad-language-profane-trump-brings-presidential-swearing-out-into-open-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/bad-language-profane-trump-brings-presidential-swearing-out-into-open-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad language: profane Trump brings presidential swearing out into open – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

President has let rip with swearwords in recent months, redefining norms about acceptable language in public office
W<\/span>ith a lifetime of political memories stretching back to John F Kennedy\u2019s assassination and the Black civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Cheryl Johnson had one complaint above all else about today\u2019s politicians: the swearing.
\u201cAll this cursing in politics, we never heard that before,\u201d said Johnson, a retired social worker living in the Pittsburgh area. \u201cWords are very powerful, and the past 45 presidents of this country, have not used such vile language.
\u201cIs that how teachers, corporate leaders, nurses, doctor, dentist speak in their work environment? It\u2019s not OK. It\u2019s a decline in respect and honor, period.\u201d
Over the past decade, Donald Trump<\/a> has been at the vanguard of redefining public standards of what constitutes acceptable language.
Having already been criticized for debasing and coarsening the public discourse during his first presidency \u2013 when he was memorably reported<\/a> to have complained that US was admitting immigrants from \u201cshithole countries\u201d \u2013 Trump has let rip during his second.
He has repeatedly used, and seemingly normalized, words never previously heard in public from a US president, at least not intentionally.
A taboo seemed to be broken in June 2025, when Trump profanely condemned Israel and Iran for continuing firing at each other even after hostilities were thought to have been halted following a 12-day war. \u201cThey don\u2019t know what they fuck they\u2019re doing,\u201d he told reporters on the White House lawn.
Lest that should be taken as slip of the tongue, Trump indulged his growing taste for public obscenity again in October 2025,<\/strong> when asked about Venezuela\u2019s then president, Nicolas Maduro. \u201cHe\u2019s offered everything,\u201d claimed Trump. \u201cYou know why? Because he doesn\u2019t want to fuck around with the United States.\u201d (Months later, Maduro was seized by US special forces. He is now in custody in New York, awaiting trial.)
Trump has used profanity even more starkly in recent social media posts, deploying it to raise rhetorical pressure on Tehran after it closed the strait of Hormuz following Trump\u2019s decision to launch the US-Israel war on Iran in February. \u201cOpen the Fuckin\u2019 Strait, you crazy bastards, or you\u2019ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH,\u201d he posted on his Truth Social platform in April.
\u201cPresident Trump doesn\u2019t have a very strong sense of decorum,\u201d said Michael Adams, a professor of English language at Indiana University Bloomington, and author of In Praise of Profanity, a study of swearing\u2019s place in society. \u201cThe swearing has a whole range of aspects to it. Some of it is this emphatic diplomatic persona, and some of it is believing in the unpredictability of the president, and his general sense that he doesn\u2019t care.\u201d
Trump is hardly the first president with a taste for the profane. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were both renowned for liberal use of earthy vernacular, but in private. Their bad language was only exposed when tape recordings of their conversations were released after their presidencies.
In Nixon\u2019s case, his swearing became an issue during Watergate, when the White House released heavily-redacted transcripts of his taped conversations \u2013 with repeated use of the telling phrase \u201cexpletive deleted\u201d.
Trump\u2019s increasingly cavalier approach to obscenity is a far cry from George W Bush\u2019s mortified response when he was a US presidential candidate in September 2000. During the campaign, a live mic picked up<\/a> his description of a New York Times journalist as a \u201cmajor-league asshole\u201d.
A chastened Bush, running on a pledge to restore civility to politics, voiced \u201cregret\u201d that his remark was heard.
These days, by contrast, politicians are only too keen for voters to hear what would once have been indiscretions, according to analysts. While Trump may have opened the floodgates, other officials and candidates \u2013 Republican and Democrat alike \u2013 have followed through.
Joseph Phillips, an American politics professor at Trinity College Dublin, puts this down to a search for authenticity in an era when politicians have fallen in public esteem.
\u201cThe incentive for politicians to use profanity [comes from] a change in how people view the profession,\u201d Phillips said. \u201cThe level of political trust that Americans have has declined a lot, and this has changed how people see politicians.
\u201cPoliticians have the incentive to buck that particular trend of appearing unscrupulous and unrelatable by doing a very cheap thing that we all can do, which is using language more typical of ordinary people, which would include cursing.\u201d
In that vein, US vice-president JD Vance has commonly used the word \u201cshit\u201d, in speeches and on social media, to bait political opponents and critics.
Speaking at a military base in Kentucky on Thanksgiving last year, Vance drew criticism after telling soldiers who raised their hands when asked if they liked eating turkey that they were \u201cfull of shit\u201d.
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has used scatalogical terms to deride previous practices in the armed forces he regards as woke, telling a gathering of generals at a marine base in Quantico, Virginia last September: \u201cWe\u2019re done with that shit.\u201d
Democrats, too, have embraced verbal vulgarity.
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey told Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents<\/a> to \u201cget the fuck out\u201d of the city after an agent shot dead a mother-of-three, Renee Nicole Good, in her vehicle in January.
Earlier this week Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois, told a Washington thinktank<\/a> she was \u201ctired of fixing shit that Republicans break\u201d. Arguing against being polite if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in November\u2019s midterm elections, she said: \u201cFuck that shit.\u201d
While the long-term impact may be to reduce public respect for politics even further, those competing for office are unlikely to care.
\u201cThe incentive of an individual politician is probably not to regain the esteem of the profession, but instead to ensure their own election or re-election,\u201d argued Phillips. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t be the first time that politicians have run sacrificing a broader institution for personal gain.\u201d
Adams, of Indiana University, said politicians were seeking \u201ccovert prestige\u201d in descending into coarse language.
\u201cThere is a covert prestige to swearing that has to do with the swashbuckling image of the inveterate swearer \u2013 a sort of devil-may-care attitude that attracts people,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople do swear, and if you never swear, then people wonder if you\u2019re really like them enough that you would be a good president for them.
\u201cIt\u2019s comparable to when George W Bush and Barack Obama were campaigning and people asked: \u2018Would you want to have a beer with them?\u2019 It wasn\u2019t a glass of vintage wine, or a very old single malt \u2013 it was a plebeian drink with the plebs. Swearing fits into the same rhetorical maneuver.\u201d
Benjamin Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, and author of \u201cWHAT THE F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves,\u201d <\/strong>suggested the heated language was being fueled by the fact that \u201cwe are in a very strident time of political disagreement\u201d.
The polarized atmosphere, he said, could mean it is only a matter of time before previously unthinkable \u2013 let alone utterable \u2013 profanities crop up in presidential inaugural speeches, or State of the Union addresses.
\u201cI don\u2019t see any reason why there\u2019s anything special about a State of the Union address or a speech in front of the UN, or anything like that,\u201d said Bergen. \u201cI think the language norms are just changing.\u201d
But the pendulum could eventually swing back from the current profane trends, he suggested. \u201cIf politicians of one generation are seen to be swearing all the time, the next generation may just reject that entirely.\u201d
In a curious transatlantic distinction, Phillips \u2013 who previously worked in the UK \u2013 said the US tendency towards swearing has yet to be replicated in British and Irish politics.
\u201cWe\u2019re dealing with similar loss of political trust in all three countries,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, there is one way in which the US differs, and that\u2019s in the incentives for politicians to build personal brands.
\u201cPoliticians\u2019 fates in the UK and Ireland are much more tied to the fate of the party. So the incentive to change an established mode of behavior just isn\u2019t quite as high.\u201d<\/p>\n

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President has let rip with swearwords in recent months, redefining norms about acceptable language in public officeWith a lifetime of political memories stretching back to John F Kennedy\u2019s assassination and the Black civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Cheryl Johnson had one complaint above all else about today\u2019s politicians: the swearing.\u201cAll this cursing in politics, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225761,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}