‘Potty mouth’ Democrats have some new fighting words we can’t put in this headline
Profanity isn’t new in politics. But it’s reaching new heights on the left. 1/2
When Rep. Jasmine Crockett reacted to President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening, profanity leaped effortlessly from her lips: “Somebody slap me and wake me the fuck up because I’m ready to get on with it.” Just a few days earlier, when asked of her message to Elon Musk, she told him to “Fuck off.”
Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, took a more Midwestern approach: “Go to hell,” he said, adding later on X: “I said what I said.” Meanwhile, Senate Democrats launched coordinated social media videos fact checking Trump, each of them calling his claims “shit that ain’t true.”
In the earliest weeks of Trump’s second term, Democrats have careened from strategy to strategy to respond to him, often ineffectually. But one unifying thread as they try to invigorate their connection to the American voter has been a reach for profanity.
Democrats are cursing up a storm.“Goddamn it, tell me who started that?”said Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a frequent purveyor of profanity.
Cursing is, of course, not new in politics. Among operatives, principals and journalists, it is a familiar way to broker instant bonhomie. Nor is it new for the Democratic Party, particularly when confronting Trump: Former DNC Chair Tom Perez frequently deployed profanity in 2017 in stump speeches, saying, for example, that Trump didn’t “give a shit about health care.”
the breadth of swearing is unmistakable, newly fashionable among members of a party in the wilderness who are looking for shortcuts to authenticity to channel voters’ rage.
In recent days, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said he wanted the “intern” at the National Republican Campaign Congressional Committee who posted “racist shit” on X fired. And appraising the landscape of Trump’s America, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii noted this week that the “stock market is down but at least everything is more expensive and services are getting shittier.”
Politics, the late Andrew Breitbart once observed, is downstream of culture. And linguistically speaking, Democrats are up a certain creek.
Trump beat them to it, using curses increasingly in his march back to the White House, though for some Democrats it is part of their native tongue.
“I mean, I was swearing before Trump, so I can’t really blame it on him,” Gallego told POLITICO. “I’m gonna blame it more on being in the Marines for as long as I was.”
Now, Democrats are seeking to bottle up their impolite words and serve them up the maw of an increasingly coarse and foul-tongued populace.
“Some of it is genuine, some of it is people trying to seem faux-edgy authentic,” said Lis Smith, the Democratic adviser whose profanity is so legendary that her f-bombs played a hand in earning Amazon’s otherwise wholesome documentary on Pete Buttigieg in 2021 an “R” rating.“If the first time you’ve used a cuss word in public is reading off a script, it’s probably not authentic and not something you should do.”
It’s also become part of Democrats’ increased social media strategy. After posting their “shit that ain’t true” videos on social media, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made one “breaking down the BS Trump told” during his joint address. (The top Senate Democrat didn’t go as far as saying bullshit in the video though — opting instead for “bull.”)
It is not always working. Last month, when Democrats joined federal workers at a rally of the American Federation of Government Employees to protest DOGE cuts, the profanities nearly rivaled those gathered.
“I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to fuck Trump,” said Rep. Maxine Dexter(D-Ore.), adding, “Please don’t tell my children that I just did that.” (These people are really sick!)
The awkward formulation — which landed less like a diss and more like a proposition — was roundly mocked.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/09/frustrated-dems-unleash-the-f-bombs-00218336