June 24, 2025, 8:13 p.m.
The notion that a president is a role model for American boys and girls died Tuesday after a long illness, fatally wounded by a casual profanity uttered by President Trump as he left the White House for the NATO summit. The death had been a long time coming after deleted expletives in the 1970s, talk of oral sex in the White House in the 1990s, taped comments about grabbing women in 2005, and a finding of liability for sexual abuse in 2023.
Death came at 6:42 a.m. It was not quiet. It came in front of television cameras and microphones and reporters, all gathered on the South Lawn of the White House. As the president took questions, it was quickly evident that he was angry. His ire was directed first at the news networks who had not immediately accepted his claims of total victory for the air strikes he launched against Iran. Then, he aimed it at the leaders of Iran and Israel, who had not immediately bowed when he declared a ceasefire on Monday.
“We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” he said with some swagger before cutting off the questioning and walking to Marine One.
With that, the president entered the very short and mostly recent record of presidents cursing in public, following a very long history of presidents swearing in private.
Of the 45 men who have held the office, only one is believed to have never sworn. That was Ulysses S. Grant. Even in the roughest battles of the Civil War, Grant never was moved to curse. “I never learned to swear,” he wrote. “When a boy I seemed to have an aversion to it, and when I became a man I saw the folly of it. I have always noticed, too, that swearing helps to rouse a man’s anger; and when a man flies into a passion his adversary who keeps cool always gets the better of him.”
Grant died 132 years before Trump took office. He would have a hard time comprehending the ease with which today’s president turns to profanity. He would not recognize a country that once was repelled by such language but barely blinked at the president’s comment Tuesday.
Certainly Harry Truman would find it strange how much criticism he took for far milder expletives. In 1960, as an ex-president, he went to Texas to stump for Democrat John F. Kennedy against Republican Richard Nixon. He bluntly told a dinner crowd that if they voted for Nixon, “you ought to go to hell.”
In Waco, 72 Baptist ministers passed a resolution denouncing Truman’s language. Republicans demanded an apology. At his Oct. 13 debate with Nixon, Kennedy was asked to apologize for Truman’s audacity. With a bit of a laugh, Kennedy said, “I really don’t think there’s anything that I could say to President Truman that’s going to cause him, at the age of 76, to change his particular speaking manner.”
Nixon pounced, saying a president cannot lose his temper and noting “that whoever is president is going to be a man that all the children of America will either look up to or will look down to.” He boasted that Republicans had “restored dignity and decency and, frankly, good language to the conduct of the presidency of the United States.”
Sen. John F. Kennedy speaks to former President Harry Truman during the presidential campaign in 1960. (AP Photo)
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Thirteen years later, the country was reminded of Nixon’s promise when he was forced to release tapes of his White House conversations. Before reading the substance, everyone noted how many times words were redacted and replaced with “Expletive deleted.” It branded Nixon as a serial swearer. Only later did it come out that most of the words deleted were no harsher than “hell” or “damn.”
“Back then it was just another club to cudgel Nixon with. His adversaries exulted in using the ‘expletives deleted’ to pile on,” said his longtime aide and speechwriter Ken Khachigian.
“In nearly 20 years of our personal relationship—including four years of daily meetings in San Clemente, he never uttered that word. Many others—mostly golf-course utterances—but never, ever” the word Trump used, Khachigian told National Journal.
It is but one of many such words that come easily to Trump, who won the office only weeks after the 2005 Access Hollywood tape surfaced in which he boasted of forcing himself on women, saying, “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Since then, he has talked of “shithole countries” and called Kamala Harris “a shit vice president.” The week before last year’s election, The New York Times noted that he had “used words that would have once gotten a kid’s mouth washed out with soap at least 140 times in public this year.” Including “tamer four-letter words like ‘damn’ and ‘hell,’” the paper counted 1,787 times Trump had cursed in public that year.
Perhaps most shockingly, when he sat next to the cardinal of New York at the Al Smith Dinner for Catholic Charities, he said, “I don’t give a shit if this is comedy or not.”
Those many instances tallied by the Times were all as a candidate, rather than as commander in chief. But regardless of his title, the blue streak is on brand for Trump.
“This is a president who had risen to office precisely because he professes to be unbound by political or even cultural conventions,” said Russell Riley, co-chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program and the White Burkett Miller Center Professor of Ethics and Institutions at the University of Virginia. “What you see is what you get, and with his supporters it is the rawness and the authenticity that they find very appealing. Their sense is that there is too much hypocrisy in the world and the way that you deal with it is you seek out somebody who's authentic.”
Many other presidents used objectionable words. But most of the country knew this only because of hot microphones, leaks, or inadvertent disclosures. In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt got in trouble when he was overheard saying “damn” when he struggled with a new voting machine. Lyndon B. Johnson starred in many tales of his salty language. Barack Obama told Rolling Stone that Republican Mitt Romney was “a bullshitter.”
George W. Bush didn’t know a microphone picked up him calling a New York Times reporter “a major league asshole.” And Vice President Joe Biden famously was overheard telling Obama that signing the Affordable Care Act was “a big fucking deal.” As president, Biden also called a Fox News reporter a “stupid son of a bitch.”
Richard Nixon
Library of Congress
But those presidents either apologized or tried to turn to humor. Only Trump has reveled in the attention.
“If he feels like unburdening himself with profanity in front of a formal spray of microphones, then he's going to do it,” Riley said. “For those of us who are offended by it, too bad.” Many voters, he predicted, will “wish that he wouldn't do this, but in the end it just doesn't matter because that's who he is and they'll just shrug their shoulders and live with it.”
Trump also is helped, he said, by the coarsening of American culture since Nixon’s days, including Bill Clinton’s infamous trysts with intern Monica Lewinsky in the White House. “This is just another one of those cultural things where it has just become gradually more acceptable over time,” he said. “And I suspect it will become more normalized. I wish it wouldn't be. But I don't know how you turn the clock back on something like that.”
At least Trump will not suffer the fate of his presidential idol, Andrew Jackson, who also had a colorful vocabulary. Jackson doted on his pet parrot Poll (short for Polly) and had her in the room for some of his most colorful tirades against his political enemies. When Jackson died in 1845, Poll was taken to the funeral. There, in the church, the parrot, according to one account, “let loose perfect gusts of ‘cuss words.” So shocked were the ministers and the mourners that the parrot had to be taken out of the church.
Trump, who openly disdains pets and is the only president other than James K. Polk not to have one, will be spared such a betrayal.
