Kamala Harris’s use of profanity hasn’t caused much hand-wringing, even from right-wing media. Photo / Haiyun Jiang, The New York Times
Kamala Harris does it. So does Donald Trump. In politics, profanity may be a short cut to trust and authenticity, writes Maura Judkis.
Kamala Harris’s mother taught her to “never do anything half-a--ed”, as the vice president said at the Democratic National Convention last month.
One thing that Harris does not do half-a--ed?
Profanity.
The vice president knows how to deploy a curse word to proper effect, for emphasis or humour. There was the time she ribbed her niece, Meena Harris, for her rudimentary cooking questions: “You need to f---ing learn how to cook,” said Auntie Harris, in a video shared on X by Meena. Trying to get governors to rally for President Joe Biden early this summer before he dropped out, she told them: “This is about saving our f---ing democracy,” according to Post reporter Tyler Pager.
Last year, as she offered advice to young Asian and Pacific Islander Americans on how to succeed in a society that doesn’t make it easy for minorities, she said: “We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t. And then you need to kick that f---ing door down.”
There remain a few places in American life where profanity continues to be unacceptable. A courtroom is one of them. And, as you may have noticed by the bleeps in this story, this newspaper is another.
But politics? Well, you can say whatever the f--- you want these days, it seems. Harris’s use of profanity hasn’t caused much hand-wringing, even from right-wing media.
Profanity in political rhetoric “almost seems like it’s been normalised”, which might sap its impact, says Benjamin Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego who researches profanity.
After all, Harris’s opponent has been out there cursing a blue streak for nearly a decade of campaigning: from Donald Trump’s Oval Office remarks about “s--- hole” countries, to calling Senator Mitt Romney a “pompous a--”, to recently leading his supporters in chants of “Bulls---!” Earlier this summer, in a video leaked to the Daily Beast, Trump called Harris “so f---ing bad”. Trump said at a recent rally that both his wife and evangelical leader Franklin Graham have asked him to tone down the curse words; Trump then said he has no plans to do that.
The last time a political swear was considered a big effing deal - at least in the pre-Trump era - was when Vice President Joe Biden, congratulating President Barack Obama on the Affordable Care Act in 2010, was caught on a hot mic saying “This is a big f--ing deal.” Cue the outrage from his political opponents, who clogged the airwaves with hand-wringing about propriety. Cue the “BFD” shirts sold by Democratic organisations.
Biden, of course, has been caught swearing in public many times since then. And many other politicians have used language once considered unbefitting of their office. In an interview with Rolling Stone during his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama insinuated that his opponent, Mitt Romney, was a “bulls---ter”. In 2000, President George W. Bush called one New York Times reporter a “major league a--hole”. On the Senate floor in 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney told Senator Patrick J. Leahy “f--- yourself”.
Presidential cursing goes back further in history: Lyndon B. Johnson, known for his constant profanity, would sometimes mutter that he didn’t “know what the f--- to do about Vietnam”.
Historic letters from a friend of Abraham Lincoln reported that the 16th president once told a joke - quoting Revolutionary War soldier Ethan Allen - that “Nothing that Will Make an Englishman S--- So quick as the Sight of Genl Washington.”
Those words were said largely in private, though. The swearing happening in the 2024 election is often part of official remarks.
Politicians who curse publicly offer us a “truer reflection of self than a censored version” in the 1950s and ‘60s, says Timothy Jay, a professor emeritus of psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has devoted his career to studying the psycholinguistics of cursing.
Given that these aren’t hot-mic situations, the candidates are deploying profanity as a calculated strategy.
“When you curse publicly, it has to be deliberate,” says Gil Duran, a former communications director for Harris who now writes a newsletter about political language. And “it’s a guaranteed way to get more attention”.
Swearing can build rapport by making a person appear more relatable. Most people swear - presidents: they’re just like us! - and plain-spokenness can communicate that a person is on the same side as the listener. Profanity can be a shortcut to authenticity.
I swear, therefore I speak the truth.
“It can be cathartic to hear somebody cuss, depending on the context of the conversation,” Duran says. “When she said to ‘kick that f---ing door down,’ right? That’s what people wanted to hear. We’re not going to be kept out of the system by racism and sexism. We’re going to get in there one way or the other.”
Profanity is in the ear of the listener, and not all bad words are created equal. Some are slurs, used to denigrate people or groups, and those ones are still verboten in politics. Profanity that refers to body parts is also generally less accepted. But many of the ones we’ve dashed out here are malleable, evolving words that can be used to express nearly any emotion: joy, anger, fear, excitement, frustration. Our reaction to them depends on various factors, including our upbringing, how offensive we consider the word to be, and whether we identify with the person saying them.
“There’s a neurological and physiological reaction that happens when people are exposed to words that they themselves judge to be taboo,” Bergen says. “You get blood flow to the extremities, your pupils dilate, your blood pressure increases. And you get a hit of adrenaline.”
Harris and Trump deploy profanity in different ways. With Trump, cursing tends to manifest as insult, or an accentuation of his anger. Harris’s profanity tends to be an emphasiser, and that has been true among smaller audiences as well, Duran says. Among staffers or friends, she would deploy a humorous curse word to “drop the mask a little bit and be real”. (Adds Duran: “The only politician who has never cussed in my presence … was Dianne Feinstein, who very much frowned upon such behaviour.”)
Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Harris’s pick for vice president, is fond of the word “damn”, which seems aligned with his folksy Midwest dad brand. During his convention acceptance speech, when describing how Minnesotans live and let live, he uttered a phrase that has also become a rallying cry: “Mind your own damn business.” He has also defended himself from Republican criticism about his military service: “I am damn proud of my service to this country.”
Senator JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, is not prone to strong language in public. Vance recently told Harris, in a speech, to “Go to hell” - which, though an aggressive sentiment, was mild at the word level. Quoting a scene from Pulp Fiction at a July event for social conservatives, Vance bleeped himself by saying “mother effing”. Vance is, like many of us, more profane in private - for example, in text messages with right-wing conspiracy theorist Charles Johnson, according to a Washington Post report.
Profanity is bipartisan. Jay’s own studies in the psycholinguistics of cursing have shown that smart people with big vocabularies are better swearers - meaning that they use more varied swear words, and in more interesting, creative ways. “Wherever the intelligentsia are within the electorate, those are the people who are going to be good at swearing,” Jay says.
But our reaction to profanity is sexist. Women who swear, according to linguist Tony McEnery’s 2005 book Swearing in English, can be perceived to be more aggressive or unladylike - accusations that have dogged Hillary Clinton. Edward Klein’s anti-Clinton book Guilty as Sin is rife with obscenity-laden quotations attributed to Clinton by anonymous sources. In 2017, Fox News clutched its pearls at Clinton using a swear word to describe Trump’s inauguration - “That was some weird s---” - except she was quoting George W. Bush.
Women who swear may do so as a way to strive for gender parity. If you’re going to compete with men, you might try to talk like them. Perhaps the best example of this is fictional: Veep, which was known for having some of the most inventive and prolific cursing since George Carlin was on the comedy circuit. Some of fictional vice president Selina Meyer’s swears are so salty, we can’t even dash them out - like when she said that the “c” in D.C. stands for a four-letter word that Carlin included in his famous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”
Criticism of Harris’s swearing has not been nearly as pointed as it was for Clinton - a sign that language and manners are evolving. (Whether that’s in a positive or negative direction is up for interpretation.) Or maybe we’re actually ready to focus on the issues, and not the utterances.
Is the president cursing? Well, as long as they’re doing their job …
“Who gives a s--- whether she said half-a--ed?” Jay says.
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