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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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