President Donald Trump has made public profanity a regular feature of his second term, deploying obscenities in remarks to reporters, in speeches and on social media, linguists and political scientists told the Guardian. The pattern has spread to other senior officials across both parties, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Senator Tammy Duckworth.

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, a retired social worker living in the Pittsburgh area, said: “All this cursing in politics, we never heard that before. 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.”

Trump’s first term drew criticism for coarse language, including his reported complaint that the United States was admitting immigrants from “shithole countries.” In his second term, the president has made public obscenity more routine. In June 2025, 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. In October 2025, discussing Venezuela’s then-president Nicolás Maduro, Trump said: “He’s offered everything. You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.” Months later, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces and is now in custody in New York, awaiting trial.

Trump has used profanity even more starkly on social media. In April, after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz following Trump’s decision to launch the U.S.-Israel war on Iran in February, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH.”

Michael Adams, a professor of English language at Indiana University Bloomington and author of “In Praise of Profanity,” said: “President Trump doesn’t have a very strong sense of decorum. 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.”

Presidential profanity is not new. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both swore liberally in private, but their bad language became public only when tape recordings of their conversations were released after their presidencies. During Watergate, the White House released redacted transcripts of Nixon’s conversations that repeatedly used the phrase “expletive deleted.”

George W. Bush offered a contrasting model during the 2000 campaign, when a live microphone picked up his description of a New York Times journalist as a “major-league asshole.” Bush voiced “regret” that the remark was heard and ran on a pledge to restore civility to politics.

These days, by contrast, politicians are only too keen for voters to hear what would once have been indiscretions, according to analysts. Vice President JD Vance has commonly used the word “shit” in speeches and on social media in a pattern the Guardian characterized as baiting 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.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has used scatological terms in remarks about 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 have followed the same trajectory. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to “get the fuck out” of the city after an agent shot dead Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, in her vehicle in January. Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, told a Washington think tank earlier this week that she was “tired of fixing shit that Republicans break” and, when asked about politeness if Democrats regain control of the Senate in November’s midterm elections, added: “Fuck that shit.”

Joseph Phillips, an American politics professor at Trinity College Dublin, attributed the bipartisan shift to a decline in political trust. “The level of political trust that Americans have has declined a lot, and this has changed how people see politicians,” Phillips said. “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.”

Phillips said individual incentives explain why the trend persists even as it may erode public respect for politics further. “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,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the first time that politicians have run sacrificing a broader institution for personal gain.”

Adams described the appeal as “covert prestige.” “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.” Adams compared the rhetorical move to the “would you want to have a beer with them” test previously applied to candidates, a question that “wasn’t a glass of vintage wine, or a very old single malt — it was a plebeian drink with the plebs.”

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,” said the heated language was being fueled by the fact that “we are in a very strident time of political disagreement.” Bergen said he saw no reason to expect the norms to hold at high-profile venues. “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,” Bergen said. “I think the language norms are just changing.” Bergen suggested the pendulum could eventually swing back. “If politicians of one generation are seen to be swearing all the time, the next generation may just reject that entirely.”

Phillips noted a transatlantic distinction: while the United Kingdom and Ireland have seen similar declines in political trust, the U.S. tendency toward swearing has not been replicated in British or Irish politics. Phillips said there was one way in which the United States differed, pointing to “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,” he said. “So the incentive to change an established mode of behavior just isn’t quite as high.”