When politicians swear these days, it’s not a slip on a hot mic but on purpose — part of their brand.
When politicians swear these days, it’s not a slip on a hot mic but on purpose — part of their brand.
‘O ne man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.” So wrote Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan in 1971.
Long before that, our Founding Fathers knew the value of profanity. In 1732, Benjamin Franklin, disguised behind his alter ego “Poor Richard,” published his first almanack for the workingman. Sprinkled among the homespun wisdom was the occasional salty barb. “The greatest monarch on the proudest throne is obliged to sit upon his own arse,” he wrote. In another edition, he warned, “Force sh**s upon reason’s back.”
In all his 18th-century wisdom, Franklin understood that well-placed vulgarity could be funny, human, and even enlightening. He didn’t lace every aphorism with “arse” and “sh**,” but he knew when to drop one in to snap readers to attention. Swearing was a spice, not the entrée.
Today’s politicians, in their utter lack of wisdom, fail to understand this — or choose to ignore it.
We’ve entered an era where profanity isn’t just tolerated — it’s campaign strategy. When politicians across the spectrum swear these days, it’s not a slip on a hot mic but on purpose, part of their brand. They curse not because they’ve lost their temper. They curse because their social media team ran the numbers.
When every show, podcast, and tweet is riddled with f-bombs, the word stops meaning anything. But political swearing has taken that trend into absurd new territory — language that was once private and risqué is now merchandised and monetized.
Take Senator John Fetterman, who seems to view every public appearance as an opportunity to see how many times he can say “f***” before the FCC files a restraining order. On Real Time with Bill Maher, he casually lobbed, “What the f*** are we doing?” — and was instantly rewarded with viral accolades from the kinds of people who confuse profanity with profundity.
Fetterman has built his entire persona around blue-collar cosplay — the hoodie, the tattoos, the “just a regular guy who eats drywall for breakfast” energy. The swearing is baked into that. Never mind that working-class people tend to value decency, propriety, and results. Politicians have convinced themselves that saying “sh**” every six minutes makes you sound like you’ve worked summers rolling asphalt for a roadbuilding company.
Clearly, Democratic politicians see profanity as a shortcut to appealing to the working-class males whose support the party has hemorrhaged over the past decade. Pete Buttigieg, trying hard to make it appear as if he isn’t actually three toddlers stacked up inside of a trench coat, called the Trump administration’s recent Signal leak controversy the “highest level of f***up imaginable,” while Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois called Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth a “f***ing liar.”
But this is a complete misreading of what working Americans want. They’re not pining for some member of Congress to behave in a committee hearing as if it’s improv night at the Chuckle Hut. They want stability. They want to send their kids to school without needing a pocket translator for every new gender theory. They want groceries to stop costing more than their first car. (They want cars to stop costing as much as their first house.) They don’t want performative toughness — they want sanity. Swearing into a microphone doesn’t make you sound like one of them. It makes you sound like someone pretending to be one of them.
All this tough-guy theater does is ruin profanity for when we really need it. “If only our half-dozen ‘bad’ words could be got off the lavatory wall and on the printed page,” wrote George Orwell, “they would soon lose their magical quality, and the habit of swearing, degrading to our thoughts and weakening to our language, might become less common.”
Orwell is correct that profanity will lose its potency if we incorporate swearing into our everyday speech. But we need potency! We need these words for special occasions! Like when you stub your toe on a cement block or back your car into the neighbors’ mailbox.
Today’s carefully calculated obscenity is just embarrassing. In 2019, Representative Rashida Tlaib famously told a crowd, “We’re gonna impeach the motherf***er!” — and the applause almost drowned out the sound of the DNC’s merch printers firing up. Beto O’Rourke, perpetually in campaign mode, has dropped f-bombs in many contexts, from commenting on school shootings to his most comfortable forum, concession speeches. When the Democrats’ newest celebrity, Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, was asked what she had to say to Elon Musk, she wittily replied, “F*** off.”
To paraphrase Sir John Gielgud’s dig at Liza Minnelli in the movie Arthur, usually one must go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of Crockett’s stature.
On the right, swearing is the new flannel-shirt emblem of populism, as when Kristi Noem, in her book, casually referred to colleagues as “assholes” and “jackasses.”
Donald Trump brought vulgarity to public life by saying out loud what most politicians whispered to aides behind closed doors. He has coarsened the public discourse by slinging around “bullsh**.” Now D.C. folk are rushing through that opened door, trying to seem “authentic” by talking crudely and failing badly.
Swearing isn’t the same as being decisive, or strong, or possessed of brilliant ideas. It’s rhetorical inflation — more heat, less value. As NR’s Noah Rothman wrote last week, “There was a time in living memory when politicians tried to avoid giving their opponents evidence that they’re as dumb as their critics claimed.”
While the right swears to own the libs, and the left swears to prove they’re not coastal snobs, the rest of us are left wondering when politics turned into an episode of Deadwood without the whiskey- and blood-soaked charisma of the aptly named Al Swearengen.
Swearing used to be a sign that you were fired up. Now it’s a vulgarity vending machine. What comes out is junk.