Politicians Aren’t Cool Enough to Curse This Much

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The winter of early 1981 was a simpler time, a gentler time. Like so many college students, I was watching Saturday Night Live in the living room of my small dorm when the SNL cast member Charles Rocket dropped an f-bomb on live television. I looked around at my fellow students. Did we just hear that? The show was already struggling with ratings, and within a few weeks, Rocket and the producer—and eventually, most of the cast—were fired.

Oh, to be so young again, and so easily shocked at someone dropping the Mother of All Obscenities on live television.

Actually, the Mother of All Obscenities might be the one that includes mother, and if you haven’t heard it lately, former Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris would be happy to refresh your memory. Addressing a gathering in Los Angeles a few days ago, Harris delivered her verdict on the current Trump administration: “These motherfuckers are crazy.”

Harris might have gone for the thermonuclear option, but plenty of other politicians are rooting around in the verbal dumpster. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, recently posted a video about the government shutdown in which he tried to sound like Robert De Niro, vowing that the Democratic position on cutting health-care funding was “No. Fucking. Way.” (Sorry, senator. You’ve got the New York accent, but you’re no Bobby D.) And Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on Monday that she’s changing her mind on health care because she wasn’t in Congress “when all this Obamacare, ‘Affordable Care Act’ bullshit started.”

Elected officials cursing is a spreading epidemic, and it has to stop. I say this as someone who loves to swear. I was raised by a father who claimed to be offended by profanity, but my dad was just like the Old Man in A Christmas Story: When he was angry—especially at inanimate objects—he would invent swears like a German lexicographer trying to come up with new compound nouns.

I went off to college and graduate school and became a man of letters: B.A., M.A., Ph.D. But I never let go of other letters that I love, especially F and all of the delightful things that could be appended to it. I find hauling off with various Anglo-Saxonisms cathartic on those occasions when I bang my elbow on the edge of my chair or have to reboot a balky router for the 19th time. I know it’s crude, but I console myself with the conclusions of a 2015 study that suggested that swearing may actually be a sign of intelligence. People who are “good at language,” Timothy Jay, one of the study’s authors, said to CNN, “are good at generating a swearing vocabulary.” You bet your ass we are.

Sorry, sorry. Habit.

But even though swearing has its honored place in my life, I don’t want to hear it from my elected officials. One of the delights of swearing is that it’s unusual, a release from normal decorum that comes only from extraordinary circumstances. (For a great example of how unexpected cursing can be funny and perfectly timed, watch this clip from the 1987 film Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which has almost no profanity until Steve Martin’s character is finally pushed over the brink by a rental company that rented him a nonexistent car.)

If you swear all the time or in every circumstance, however, it’s not swearing—it’s just the way you talk. Russians, in my experience, are the leaders in casual cursing, and after a while, you don’t hear it anymore; you just think that obscene words are regular particles of Russian speech. Frequent cursing can become tiring instead of funny. As the swearing-study author Jay notes, the strategic use of obscenity “is a social cognitive skill like picking the right clothes for the right occasion. That’s a pretty sophisticated social tool.”

If only American politicians could be that sophisticated. Instead, politics in the United States is plagued by middle-aged people swearing just to seem cool.

They are not cool.

The Democrats have some true public-swearing champs, but President Donald Trump and the wannabe tough guys who surround him are no slouches in the profanity competition. Presidents historically have shown more decorum than the common folk in Congress—especially that rabble in the House, of course—but not Trump. He loves the word bullshit, which he has used while speaking publicly in the White House, and he’s not above tippling the harder stuff: Iran and Israel, he said to a press spray some months ago, have been fighting so long that “they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

The president is the most effortlessly vulgar of the bunch when he swears, because when he talks about almost anything, he already sounds like a low-level Mafia guy complaining about what he has to kick upstairs to the bosses. Yesterday, when asked about who would be given back pay after the government shutdown ends, he said that “for the most part, we’re going to take care of our people. There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”

That’s a statement that actually would have sounded even more naturally mookish if it had some profanity in it.

Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of Facial Grooming Pete Hegseth have also both apparently decided that public cursing is edgy. “We’re done with that shit,” Hegseth told a conference of generals and admirals last week, with “that shit” meaning all that “woke” stuff I don’t like. I’ve worked with a lot of senior officers, and I know the military is a swearing culture, but men and women with stars on their shoulders have all mastered some basic rules of public deportment, and Hegseth’s naughtiness landed in front of that audience with a quiet thud.

Vance, whose White House portfolio now seems to consist of trolling on social media, is perhaps the most artificial and wince-inducing swearer in the administration. When an interlocutor on X suggested last month that blowing up speedboats on the high seas is a war crime, Vance summoned his years of legal training at Yale and responded: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

Did you get a little shiver from the icy manliness of that statement? Vance also called the podcaster Jon Favreau a “dipshit” online, which produces something less of a frisson. (California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has taken to trolling the administration, later used the same word to refer to Vance.)

Here, I must admit that I have been part of the problem. In 2021, in this magazine, I called Vance an “asshole.” But I had a serious discussion with my editors about using that one word, just once. I haven’t done it since, and with the exception of a few podcasts here and there, I try not to swear in public.

I accept that American culture has become, shall we say, more tolerant. We’ve come a long way since Norman Mailer’s publisher made the silly demand that he replace the classic f-bomb with “fug” in his 1948 novel, The Naked and the Dead, which supposedly prompted the actor Tallulah Bankhead to say, upon meeting Mailer, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell fuck.” I don’t really wish for a return to the days when network censors deliberated over the acceptability of hell and damn on TV shows. (Watch the stilted result here of when actors on House, M.D. had to call House an “ass” a million times, when they clearly meant to add a second syllable.) The advent of cable has freed a lot of entertainment from these artificial constraints.

Politics, however, is not entertainment. Some voters may want political life to sound like a reality show, but politicians shouldn’t give them one. I expect politicians to model the behavior they’d like to see in the electorate instead of attempting to feign authenticity by being crude. And yes, I still think politics should be a noble calling, and I would like political leaders to set standards for our kids—and everyone else—in public. I know this is a fantasy. For more than 30 years, from the time of the Clintons to the Trumps, our political culture has become more vulgarized, with no one more lacking in taste and class than our current president. But everyone else in public life can do better, instead of acting like a bunch of foul-mouthed sh—

Well, you know.

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Today’s News

President Donald Trump called for the jailing of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, accusing them of “failing to protect” ICE officers amid the immigration crackdown in the city.
Former FBI Director James Comey pleaded not guilty to two felony charges at his arraignment. A lawyer for Comey said he plans to file motions to dismiss the case; a jury trial is set for January 5.
A former Pacific Palisades resident was arrested in Florida yesterday on charges connected to California’s Palisades Fire in January. A federal criminal complaint accuses him of “maliciously” starting what became the wildfire, which killed 12 people.

Dispatches

Notes From the Editor in Chief: 250 years after the Revolution, the American project remains unfinished and troubled, but “a project worth pursuing,” Jeffrey Goldberg writes in The Atlantic’s new issue.

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Evening Read

Illustration of King George III as young man with powdered wig and arched eyebrow in the style of an oil painting — Illustration by Lola Dupre. Source: Piemags / Alamy.

The Myth of Mad King George

By Rick Atkinson

As the British monarch during the American Revolution, [King George III] has, for two and a half centuries, symbolized haughty intransigence and been portrayed as a reactionary dolt incapable of grasping the fervor for liberty that animated his American subjects. On Broadway, he minces through Hamilton as a foppish, sinister clown, singing to the estranged rebels, “You’ll be back” and adding, “I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”

In truth, the public opening by the British Crown of George III’s papers in the past decade reveals him to be a far more complex, accomplished, and even estimable figure than the prevailing caricature.

Read the full article.