Photo: Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images
If you searched “Donald Trump” and “F-word” yesterday, you would have found a tremendous number of articles — mostly about whether it’s appropriate to call him a “fascist.” That changed on Tuesday morning, when the president dropped an F-bomb while discussing the ceasefire between Israel and Iran.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” Trump said.
Trump used the curse word after a reporter asked if he believes Iran is still committed to peace in light of Israel’s claims that Iran had violated the agreement just hours after it went into effect. Here’s his full response:
Yeah, I do. They violated, but Israel violated it too.
Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs the likes of which I’d never seen before. The biggest load that we’ve seen. I’m not happy with Israel.
You know, when I say, “Okay, now you have 12 hours,” you don’t go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them. So I’m not happy with them. I’m not happy with Iran, either.
But I’m really unhappy if Israel is going out this morning because the one rocket that didn’t land, that was shot, perhaps by mistake, that didn’t land. I’m not happy about that.
You know what? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Do you understand that?
General vulgarity has always been a core part of Trump’s political identity; his first presidential campaign was nearly done in by the disgustingly crude Access Hollywood video, and during his most recent run, he pretended to fellate his microphone at a rally. So why does this F-bomb still feel a bit surprising?
First, though we’ve heard Trump curse plenty of times (as shown in this video compiled during the 2016 campaign), he’s tried to restrain himself since entering politics. He lamented during a 2016 rally, “I’m not allowed to use any bad words. If I had used the A-word, they’d say, ‘Ooh, Trump used foul language’ … horrible, horrible.”
After Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally days before the 2024 election, the New York Times reported that his use of profanity had increased drastically during his third campaign:
Mr. Trump has always been more prone than any of his predecessors in the White House to publicly use what were once called dirty words. But in his third campaign for the presidency, his speeches have grown coarser and coarser. Altogether, according to a computer search, Mr. Trump has used words that would have once gotten a kid’s mouth washed out with soap at least 140 times in public this year. Counting tamer four-letter words like “damn” and “hell,” he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times in 2024.
What minimal self-restraint Mr. Trump once showed in his public discourse has evaporated. A recent New York Times analysis of his public comments this year showed that he uses such language 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran for president in 2016. He sometimes acknowledges that he knows he should not but quickly adds that he cannot help himself.
But the F-word still isn’t one of his most-used swear words, at least in public. While other speakers used it during the MSG rally, Trump was a bit tamer, “deploying an ‘ass,’ a couple of ‘damns,’ eight ‘hells’ and a ‘shit,’” according to the Times.
Second, despite Trump’s coarsening of the office, it’s still unusual to hear the president of the United States swear on live TV, and in this context. During his first administration, Trump dropped F-bombs on a hot mic before an Oval Office address (saying “Oh, f—” when he noticed a pen mark on his shirt); on Rush Limbaugh’s live radio show (warning that Iran shouldn’t “f— around with us” back in 2020); and deep in the Mueller Report (he reportedly responded to the special counsel’s appointment with, “This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”) But it’s unusual to hear Trump use the word before a gaggle of reporters to express his anger over a foreign-policy situation.
That brings us to the third reason Tuesday’s F-bomb felt so odd: It was directed partly at his bosom buddy Benjamin Netanyahu. It was almost as jarring to hear Trump declare, “I’m not happy with Israel.”
And, of course, there’s the fact that “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing” is an accurate summation of the current situation in the Middle East. F-bomb aside, a lot of people were just stunned to find themselves agreeing with Trump.
