Did the president drop an f-bomb? Yes, and Democrats are doing it too

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who started in politics as a young legislative aide and is now the senior Democrat in Florida’s congressional delegation, has for years calibrated her statements, carefully choosing her words to communicate exactly the message she intends.

Recently, speaking at the Broward Democratic Party’s annual fundraising dinner, she used blunt — shocking to some — language to convey the threat she said was emanating from President Donald Trump’s policies.

“F—,” she said. More than once.

Wasserman Schulz declared that Democrats would “fight to our last breath, and we’ll go to the f—ing mat.”

There has been a clear coarsening of political language: Words that once were widely seen as off-limits, other than behind closed doors or in small groups, are now more common — an extra tool to convey anger and frustration.

At another point in the Broward fundraising dinner, Wasserman Schultz decried what she said Trump and Republicans are doing. She asked the audience of 300, “Are we going to let them do that, Broward County?”

“No,” people in the audience responded.

To which the congresswoman replied with an emphatic “f— no!”

“This has been building up in me for a long time. So forgive me,” she added.

Wasserman Schultz later explained the word wasn’t in her prepared remarks but said the gravity of the threat the nation is facing in 2025 warranted an expression that once would have been stunning in a public setting.

Trump

There’s no more prominent public user of the f-word and others once widely seen as off-limits than the president.

Most recently, on June 24 he was expressing his displeasure with Iran and Israel. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing. Do you understand that?”

His use of the word in regard to Iran and Israel — speaking on the lawn of the White House — attracted massive attention, but he’s no stranger to the public use of four-letter words.

“More than any other president, Trump has been known to use coarse language in speeches and other public appearances. But even for him, this on-camera utterance of the f-word was new. American presidents have typically refrained from using it publicly, even when angry or frustrated,” NPR reported.

Just before last year’s election, the New York Times reported that a computer search found he had used curses at least 140 times in public last year, not counting words such as “damn” and “hell” that are much tamer to many people.

A review of Trump’s speech at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference found he used epithets 44 times, the Times reported.

Perhaps the most famous previous use of the f-word came from Joe Biden, then the vice president, who told President Barack Obama that his 2010 signing the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, into law was “a big f—ing deal.”

One big difference: Biden whispered it to Obama and meant it to be private, but it was picked up on an open mic. Critics at the time suggested it was an example of Biden’s tendency toward gaffes; years later some supporters were more positive about what they called the BFD moment.

Democrats join

After 10 years of Trump dominating and altering the nation’s political discourse, Democrats’ language is now changing.

“In some ways the Democrats have been slower, particularly in the Trump era, to adopt the attention-gaining messaging that Donald Trump has really leaned into,” said Joshua Scacco, an association professor of communication at the University of South Florida. “It does seem like the Trump era is catching up to Democrats in terms of how they’re responding, in terms of how they’re adapting their own messaging.”

Scacco, who specializes in political communication and media content, is also founder and director of the university’s Center for Sustainable Democracy.

At a Florida Democratic Party dinner gala, which fell between Wasserman Schultz’s and Trump’s use of the f-word, U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz was delivering remarks to an audience of 800.

The Broward-Palm Beach County congressman described what would happen when lawmakers returned to Washington to take up the measure the Republican majority passed on July 3, the legislation named “Big Beautiful Bill” at Trump’s behest.

“They’re going to try to pass the big beautiful bulls— of a bill,” Moskowitz said.

Wasserman Schultz has regularly used the term “DOGEbags” to describe the people dispatched under the Trump presidency to fan out through federal agencies as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency effort formerly led by billionaire Elon Musk to eliminate programs and slash spending.

On Monday, Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and former Republican governor of South Dakota, said she was looking forward to a visit with Trump the next day to the detention center for illegal immigrants pending deportation that Florida has established in the Everglades.

In an official statement attributed to Noem and distributed by the agency, she said the detention center would allow the government to lock up “some of the worst scumbags” in the country.

Divergent reactions

The responses to use of one of the terms that still can’t be printed or aired in most mainstream news outlets often depends on the affiliation of the person who uttered the word.

After Trump used the word, his firmness and resolve was heralded by a host on Fox, the favored cable news outlet for Republicans. A “very frustrated” president used “salty language,” she said.

Minutes later, the same Fox host professed outrage at a Democrat’s use of the term. She said she was “repulsed” by the user’s “foul mouth.”

The contradictory reactions were so extreme that it prompted mockery online and a video of excerpts calling out Fox from a host at competitor CNN.

On Wednesday, as the U.S. House of Representatives debated the big bill to cut taxes, cut social program spending, provide more money for immigration enforcement and the military, and increase the federal debt, Democrats professed outrage.

U.S. Rep. Josh Riley, D-N.Y., ran through a litany of objections, before delivering his summary.

“Don’t tell me you give a s— about the middle class when all you’re doing is s—ting on the middle class,” he said on the floor of the U.S. House.

That produced a tut-tut from U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., who was presiding over the House at the time. “Avoid vulgar speak. We do have families” present. U.S. Rep. Virginia Fox, R-N.C., chair of the House Rules Committee, echoed the reminder about “the language we should be using in this chamber.”

The admonishment prompted what was, in effect, a verbal eye roll from U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, top Democrat on the Rules Committee. “I hope that when the president comes here next, you’ll admonish him for the language he uses.”

Driving the change

Several factors are propelling the increasing use of coarse language by Democrats, Scacco said. It’s more than simply imitating Trump, he said.

The language in question “has a lot of anger in it, a lot of emotional appeal. Democratic messaging has often seemed bloodless in comparison, lacked feeling,” he said.

“Anger is a very effective emotion in mobilizing people and getting them to perk up a bit. That’s what you see here is the use of emotion in sort of that strategic manner, being angry here, frustration,” Scacco said.

Scacco is co-author of the book “The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times.”

“I think that for their base that they’re communicating. Their base wants to see that they are clued in to what’s going on. And so swearing and that emotional language I think communicates to the base that their elected officials understand the gravity and the magnitude of what’s happening,” he said.

Part of why it seems jarring is that the Democrats under Biden’s presidency and for years under an older generation of party leaders in Congress generally stuck with “that sort of more civil, decorous politics” — before they were swept away by Trump and his political movement.

Rick Hoye, chair of the Broward Democratic Party, said the kind of language that’s used publicly today by some elected officials is different than what he heard when he first got involved in politics in 2009.

Hoye said it is both a symptom of the gravity of how strongly Democrats feel and a response to the yearning by many in the party’s base that leaders do something to convey how strongly they feel.

“For our folks they’re just tired. They’re just expressing their frustration, the frustration that is felt on the ground,” Hoye said. “Democrats like people that are aggressive and fight back.”

Hoye said Democratic elected officials are “expressing the frustrations of everyday Democrats.”

He said voters “probably appreciate the fact that their elected officials are fed up and they’re speaking a language that everyone feels,” adding that “the plain-spoken language lets constituents know that they’re on the ground for them.”

“Our leaders have realized that if they don’t fight like this, the average people will get discouraged and feel that they’re not really in tune with their struggles and their sentiments. And the Democratic party doesn’t want to risk losing contact with the people that we need to show up.”

That assessment was reflected in a reaction to one of Wasserman Schultz’s strong comments at the Broward Democrats dinner.

“Excuse my French,” she said, prompting a shout from the audience: “Love it. We speak French.”

Larry Snowden, president of Club 47, the South Florida-based mega-sized club of Trump supporters, said the president is unique. “He’s been using those words for a long time,” he said, adding the Democrats seem to be attempting to emulate something that works for Trump. “They’re in shambles. Why wouldn’t you try to be like your opponent.”

Michele Merrell, the elected state Republican committeewoman from Broward County, said she doesn’t think the language that works for Trump necessarily works for others in politics, and definitely not in her view the Democrats.

“No one can out-Trump Trump,” she said.

“I see Democratic and Republican candidates try to emulate him,” she said. ‘I see various candidates try to copy his way of communicating, and it doesn’t really come across. I don’t think there’s anyone who can replicate what he does.”

News coverage

Such language was once much more hidden from the public.

Two generations ago, one of the more shocking elements in the transcripts of then-President Richard Nixon’s tapes was his frequent use of profanity. That’s how the phrase “expletive deleted” came into common parlance for a time; it was the phrase inserted in brackets to replace Nixon’s frequent use of vulgarities.

Even the Richard Nixon Foundation, on its website, acknowledged “RN’s unfortunate weakness for expletives.”

One big difference: Those were words he used in meetings and on the phone, not in widely seen public settings.

And the actual words didn’t get reported.

Today, Scacco said, strong language is a tool that the party out of power — the Democrats — can use to “gain attention in an environment where people are not focused on them.” By using earthy language, he said, “you attract the attention of journalists who are doing the story, and also people.”

How to report such language is tricky for the news media. Traditionally such words haven’t been published or aired in mainstream outlets that sought to uphold what once was seen as a standard of decorum.

But when they’re uttered by major political figures, are all over social media, and when livesteams go out online and on cable television, the calculation about preserving the public’s innocence isn’t as clear.

“Mainstream outlets generally don’t include profanity in their news reports,” wrote the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit based in St. Petersburg.

Poynter found a range of usage decisions about Trump’s use of the word. Some news organizations avoided the word in text, but used it in video. Others used the word. Some didn’t use it in either video or print. Many used hyphens or asterisks to replace some of the word’s letters.

The Associated Press Stylebook cautions against using such terms in articles unless there is a compelling reason. The AP used "f" and asterisks in text and bleeped the word on video.

In an article published in June before Trump used the word, the New York Times explained its policy that publishing such terms “should be rare. We maintain a steep threshold for vulgar words. There are times, however, when publishing an offensive expression is necessary for a reader’s understanding of what is being reported” which may include “reporting vulgarities uttered by powerful public figures and wielded in a public setting.”

When published, the Times wrote “we typically confine it to a single reference, and avoid using it in headlines, news alerts or social media posts.”

The complexity of the question was laid out in the headline of a Poynter analysis: “What do you do when the president drops an f-bomb?”

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