Trump’s public swearing draws scrutiny of political language

Donald Trump’s public use of profanity is the focus of a Guardian report published on 27 September. It documents remarks made during his second term and examines why language once associated with private presidential conversations now appears in public statements. The examples predate the report; it does not identify a new remark made on Sunday. The question for readers is how to understand those statements without assuming that their effect on voters has been measured.

What Trump said, and when

The Guardian recounts a June 2025 exchange with reporters on the White House lawn, after Israel and Iran continued firing despite an apparent halt in hostilities. Speaking about the two countries, Trump said: ‘They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.’ The setting matters: this was a comment to reporters, rather than language disclosed later from a private conversation.

The report cites another public example from October 2025. Asked about Venezuela’s then president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump said Maduro had offered everything because he did not want to ‘fuck around with the United States.’ In April 2026, the Guardian reports, Trump used profanity in a Truth Social post demanding that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz. These are three separate, earlier episodes assembled in the September report, not a sequence of remarks made this week.

The Guardian also describes other US politicians using profanity in speeches or public posts, including Vice-President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Democratic senator Tammy Duckworth. Their examples show that the report concerns a wider style of political speech. They do not, by themselves, show that Trump caused anyone else to adopt it or that voters responded in a particular way.

Public words and private precedent

That comparison has limits. The available reporting does not count public instances of swearing across presidencies or establish how often Trump uses profanity relative to his predecessors. It documents particular statements and places them alongside historical examples. Nor does it show that presidential language alone has changed what Americans consider acceptable. Those broader questions require evidence beyond a set of notable remarks.

What experts think it may signal

Michael Adams, an Indiana University professor of English language, told the Guardian that Trump’s swearing can serve more than one rhetorical purpose. Adams described emphatic language, a projection of unpredictability and an apparent disregard for convention. Those are his readings of the president’s presentation, rather than findings that any one remark persuaded its audience.

Joseph Phillips, a politics professor at Trinity College Dublin, offered another interpretation to the Guardian. He argued that diminished trust in politicians can give officeholders an incentive to sound more like ordinary people, including by swearing. Phillips also suggested individual politicians may pursue that advantage even if the practice harms respect for politics more broadly. The report does not provide a measurement of either outcome in Trump’s case.

A June 2026 question-and-answer article provided by the University of California, San Diego offers background on how audiences may hear such language. Political scientist Pamela Ban said profanity can signal identification with constituents or give voice to anger they feel is absent from official politics. Whether it sounds authentic, she said, depends on the speaker, audience and moment. She cautioned that expectations may differ for women and minority politicians.

In the same article, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen said swearing can attract both favourable and unfavourable judgments, depending partly on whether listeners already identify with the speaker and agree with the message. Bergen raised the possibility that language sounding scripted or inauthentic could undermine an intended positive effect, while saying he did not know of specific research on that point. His explanation is not evidence that Trump’s remarks had such an effect.

Bergen also described a fall 2025 survey in one undergraduate cognitive science course at UC San Diego: its students ranked the F-word 24th among words they judged offensive. That narrow sample cannot stand for Americans as a whole. Taken with the Guardian’s examples, the expert accounts help explain possible reasons for public swearing and possible differences in how it is received. Whether these particular remarks changed trust, votes or language norms remains unknown.