Politicians’ Profanity-Laced Quips Make for Colorful Campaign Season

When Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz took to the stage last week in Madison, Wisconsin for a campaign rally, he delivered a series of rapid fire, profanity-laced quips.
Walz said that Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur-turned-Trump surrogate, “is on that stage jumping around, skipping like a dipsh-t on these things, you know?”
The vice presidential candidate also questioned Trump’s reported “exhaustion,” amid a grueling campaign season: “When you get your a– whipped that hard you don’t come back for seconds?”
The crowd laughed, but certainly didn’t seem shocked.
Similarly, when JD Vance said that term — “dipsh-t” — was the best way to describe a Harris supporter at a Wisconsin rally on Monday, it barely made the news.
Gone are the days of shock and awe over a tongue-slip “f-bomb” or a “sh–” caught in a hot mic moment.
In America’s increasingly divisive election cycles, many of the so-called “seven words you can never say on television”, as coined by comedian George Carlin, actually have been uttered on TV, on the stump, at rallies and even alluded to in ads.
Take, for example, an ad released over the weekend from Musk’s own America PAC which jokingly and repeatedly calls Vice President Kamala Harris a “C-Word.” Though the C-word in the ad is actually “communist,” the allusion is to a derogatory obscenity used to insult women. An X post showing the full ad was taken down as of Monday afternoon.
This normalization of profanity is a direct result of “the coarsening of our public speech, and coarsening in the public square,” said Barbara A. Perry, a governance professor and co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
Such a “coarsening” of the public discourse is not new, of course, and is evident across the media landscape, from TV to social media. Naturally, it has made its way into the political discourse, experts in political rhetoric said.
“What is acceptable has changed. It’s not just in the political arena,” said Derrick Green, Department of Communication chairman at Cedarville University, a Christian college in Ohio.
“Words that were bleeped or censored during broadcasts are no longer being censored. What we would call cursing five, 10, 15 years ago is not seen as profanity.”
Both President Biden and former President Trump are known to lean on profanity in private, though it is Trump who changed the game when it comes to expletives in politics.
Experts who spoke to Newsweek pointed to the now infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump, during his time hosting “The Apprentice” on NBC, was heard saying he likes to grab women by the “p—-“. Since then, there have been myriad examples of his public use of profanity in and out of office, like when referred to Haiti, El Salvador and nations in Africa as “s—hole” countries in 2018.
Two weeks ago, at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he referred to Harris as a “s— vice president.”
But if there is any discomfort with this discourse, it isn’t evident in the polls: Harris and Trump are going into Election Day virtually tied, according to FiveThirtyEight and other aggregators of the most statistically reputable polls.
“This coarsening of the discourse brought about by Donald Trump doesn’t seem to be a reason why people won’t vote for him,” Perry, the UVa professor, said.
Trump changed the rulebook not only for himself, but in how politicians across the spectrum present themselves, Green added.
“He represented himself as regular guy running for president and this is how regular people talk… The idea that it’s okay for a politician to present themselves as ‘I am just a regular person.’ It’s not about looking presidential anymore… the landscape has become more casual.”
To be sure, there have been plenty of instances in modern presidential history of the Commander-in-Chief using profanity, Perry said.
She noted President Richard Nixon can be heard cursing in frustration in the Watergate tapes, and President John F. Kennedy’s nanny once recalled that his cursing was inadvertently picked up by his daughter’s toy doll as it recorded sounds.
In the 2000 campaign, a hot mic caught George W. Bush calling a New York Times reporter a “major league a–hole.” In a reminder of the relatively quaint campaigns of not so long ago, the moment became a brief campaign issue, in which the Times itself went out of its way to report on the insult using a euphemism. (Bush brushed it off, saying he was a “plainspoken fellow.”)
Notably, female candidates don’t tend to curse on the trail. While Harris is known to use colorful language behind closed doors, she has not let an errant f-bomb slip this campaign (though she did drop one during an official event in May, in which she told a group of Asian American activists: “Sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t and then you need to kick that f—— door down!”)
Likewise, Hillary Clinton — also known to let the expletives fly in private — was careful not to drop any during her run for president.
“Women are held to higher standards when they run for office on a lot of levels,” said Kelly Dittmar, an associate political science at Rutgers University and a director of research and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics.
“They are going to be more careful about coming across unqualified or unprofessional than their male counterparts. It’s not that women universally can’t do it, but they’re used to being held to a higher standard.”
But even in that there’s shades of gray.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, ran her successful gubernatorial campaign on a promise to “fix the damn roads.” Harris chose Walz for his cable news performances, which included a pointed admonishment of Republicans to “mind their own damn business.”
And even Harris herself raised an eyebrow or two when she said, during her speech accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, that her mother taught her to “never do anything half-a–ed.”
That is what has changed. Politicians have sworn for as long as there’s been politicians. But it was not until recently that their blue language has made it into the public record via official remarks. Perhaps it’s the last shred of bipartisanship left in Washington.