President Trump speaks to the press before boarding Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House on June 24 to attend the NATO leaders’ summit in The Hague. Mandel Ngan/AFP hide caption
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Mandel Ngan/AFP
President Trump on Tuesday emphatically dropped an f-bomb, on camera, expressing frustration that Israel and Iran appeared to be violating the ceasefire that he just celebrated going into effect.
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“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,” Trump said to reporters as he left the White House.
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.
“Politics is sometimes a dirty and ugly business, and so people use language there that might be better preserved in the locker room — but in no instance do I recall a president openly using this term in a public forum,” said Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
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But in a way, it wasn’t surprising at all, Riley said.
“This is a president that has seldom felt bound by the normal constraints of the office, and the use of profanity is typically one of those constraints,” said Riley. Especially this particular curse word.
Riley has heard that word come out of the mouths of former White House staff plenty over the years in his role as co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center. Staff often curse, and he said a number of presidents have been known to use expletives behind closed doors.
There have even been a handful of instances of cursing caught on a hot mic, when an official didn’t know they were being recorded. But this — an f-bomb used deliberately, on camera — was new.
There have been hot-mic f-bomb moments
When then-Vice President Joe Biden told President Barack Obama that passing the Affordable Care Act was a “big f***ing deal” in front of an amplified microphone, it became a big deal.
It quickly turned from a scandal to something Democrats joked about in fundraising appeals and became something of a calling card for Biden.
Biden was caught again on a hot mic while surveying hurricane damage in 2022, saying “no one f***s with a Biden.” But his back was to the cameras.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was also caught cursing on a hot mic, at least once.
In private, presidents Harding, Grant, Truman, Johnson and especially Nixon were known to curse, Riley said. And one time, even President Jimmy Carter dropped the f-bomb.
“He was under an enormous amount of pressure,” Riley said, recounting how Carter was weighing whether to let Iran’s Shah come the United States for medical care. “He just broke at one point and said, ‘F the Shah,'” Riley said.
In past cases, some presidents have felt compelled to show contrition when curse words made headlines. But Riley said that’s unlikely to happen with Trump, known and loved by his supporters for his plain-spoken ways.
“The question is whether you brazen it out or you apologize,” Riley said. “And I’m sure in this case, the president will just brazen it out.”
