With a lifetime of political memories stretching back to John F Kennedy’s assassination and the Black civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Cheryl Johnson had one complaint above all else about today’s politicians: the swearing.
“All this cursing in politics, we never heard that before,” said Johnson, a retired social worker living in the Pittsburgh area. “Words are very powerful, and the past 45 presidents of this country, have not used such vile language.
“Is that how teachers, corporate leaders, nurses, doctor, dentist speak in their work environment? It’s not OK. It’s a decline in respect and honor, period.”
Over the past decade, Donald Trump 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 – when he was memorably reported to have complained that US was admitting immigrants from “shithole countries” – 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. “They don’t know what they fuck they’re doing,” 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, when asked about Venezuela’s then president, Nicolas Maduro. “He’s offered everything,” claimed Trump. “You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.” (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’s decision to launch the US-Israel war on Iran in February. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH,” he posted on his Truth Social platform in April.
“President Trump doesn’t have a very strong sense of decorum,” said Michael Adams, a professor of English language at Indiana University Bloomington, and author of In Praise of Profanity, a study of swearing’s place in society. “The 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’t care.”
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’s case, his swearing became an issue during Watergate, when the White House released heavily-redacted transcripts of his taped conversations – with repeated use of the telling phrase “expletive deleted”.
Trump’s increasingly cavalier approach to obscenity is a far cry from George W Bush’s mortified response when he was a US presidential candidate in September 2000. During the campaign, a live mic picked up his description of a New York Times journalist as a “major-league asshole”.
A chastened Bush, running on a pledge to restore civility to politics, voiced “regret” 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 – Republican and Democrat alike – 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.
“The incentive for politicians to use profanity [comes from] a change in how people view the profession,” Phillips said. “The level of political trust that Americans have has declined a lot, and this has changed how people see politicians.
“Politicians 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.”
In that vein, US vice-president JD Vance has commonly used the word “shit”, 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 “full of shit”.
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: “We’re done with that shit.”
Democrats, too, have embraced verbal vulgarity.
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey told Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents to “get the fuck out” 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 she was “tired of fixing shit that Republicans break”. Arguing against being polite if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in November’s midterm elections, she said: “Fuck that shit.”
While the long-term impact may be to reduce public respect for politics even further, those competing for office are unlikely to care.
“The 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,” argued Phillips. “It wouldn’t be the first time that politicians have run sacrificing a broader institution for personal gain.”
Adams, of Indiana University, said politicians were seeking “covert prestige” in descending into coarse language.
“There is a covert prestige to swearing that has to do with the swashbuckling image of the inveterate swearer – a sort of devil-may-care attitude that attracts people,” he said. “People do swear, and if you never swear, then people wonder if you’re really like them enough that you would be a good president for them.
“It’s comparable to when George W Bush and Barack Obama were campaigning and people asked: ‘Would you want to have a beer with them?’ It wasn’t a glass of vintage wine, or a very old single malt – it was a plebeian drink with the plebs. Swearing fits into the same rhetorical maneuver.”
Benjamin Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, and author of “WHAT THE F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves,” suggested the heated language was being fueled by the fact that “we are in a very strident time of political disagreement”.
The polarized atmosphere, he said, could mean it is only a matter of time before previously unthinkable – let alone utterable – profanities crop up in presidential inaugural speeches, or State of the Union addresses.
“I don’t see any reason why there’s anything special about a State of the Union address or a speech in front of the UN, or anything like that,” said Bergen. “I think the language norms are just changing.”
But the pendulum could eventually swing back from the current profane trends, he suggested. “If politicians of one generation are seen to be swearing all the time, the next generation may just reject that entirely.”
In a curious transatlantic distinction, Phillips – who previously worked in the UK – said the US tendency towards swearing has yet to be replicated in British and Irish politics.
“We’re dealing with similar loss of political trust in all three countries,” he said. “However, there is one way in which the US differs, and that’s in the incentives for politicians to build personal brands.
“Politicians’ 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’t quite as high.”
