There was a dog that didn’t bark amid this week’s news. On Tuesday President Trump became (we think) the first US president to say the word “f**k” on live TV. This column was prepared to fulminate on how, “with all that’s going on in the world”, the American media took to the fainting couch over a harmless nugget of 16th-century Germanic profanity.
It says something about how Trump has rewired the American mind that the response was relatively muted. There is no lower form of speculative discourse than “can you imagine if [X] had done that?” but, well, can you imagine if Barack Obama had said such a thing? The closest we can find is him using the word “bullsh***er” – apparently of Mitt Romney – during a 2012 print interview in the White House. Rolling Stone magazine argued that the incident set off a “brief firestorm”.
Obama was in jocular form there. That is quite different from addressing a serious policy issue on the White House lawn. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing,” Trump said of Iran and Israel over the throb of helicopters.
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Everyone knows presidents have employed maritime vocabulary since the founding of the nation. “People said my language was bad,” Richard Nixon once remarked. “But, Jesus, you should have heard LBJ.” They have, however, almost always returned to “fudge!” and “fiddlesticks!” when in earshot of a microphone.
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Different nations have different sensibilities. Publications within those jurisdictions work along a spectrum of sensitivity. You will have already noticed that The Irish Times still plays it safe by studding asterisks among the most common bar-room expletives. “Style is, for example, f**k,” the paper’s stylebook helpfully explains.
This is not just prudishness. Newspapers tend to avoid swearing in web headlines – even with asterisks – as this can cause search engines to downrank the story. For all the talk of unregulated filth, the internet still often behaves like the pinch-mouthed maiden aunt of unjustified stereotype.
For the most part, however, the Irish have been more relaxed about cussing than the English, who, in turn, have been more relaxed about cussing than the Americans. That nation’s media will still pixellate the raised middle finger when it is offered to the camera in digital insult. Is the finger standing in for the erect male member? When fully visible is it enacting the words “f**k you!” to a frail readership?
The most infuriatingly prissy manifestation of such puritanism is that dread construction “F-bomb” – as infantilising as referring to your excreta as “poop” and “wee-wee”.
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You saw a bit of that this week. “It’s still surprising to see the president drop an F-bomb on the White House grounds,” the late-night host Seth Meyers said. “Nothing says ‘Everyone remain calm’ like dropping an F-bomb on live TV,” his rival Jimmy Fallon ventured. The word is, this usage suggests, so explosive that it can destroy careers and send broadcasters in fraught supplication before the Federal Communications Commission.
CNN had great fun contrasting the way Fox News treated Trump’s verbal detonation with the right-leaning network’s unforgiving attitude to swearing Democrats. Emily Compagno, a host on Fox, noted the president had been “using some salty language”. Just 20 minutes later Compagno was considerably more heated when addressing the use by Jasmine Crockett, a representative from Texas, of the word “f***ing” in a statement on the bombing of Iran.
The host declared herself “particularly repulsed” by the comments and went on to say, “It’s a pretty foul mouth of her for someone that went to a tidy little all-girls Catholic school.”
The CNN report from Abby Phillip continued with a montage of earlier Fox jibes at sweary Democrats that confirmed the starchy, priggish tone of so much American discourse on “bad language”. The Fox regular Jeanine Pirro argued that Democrats “are like a bunch of potty-mouth kids”. Another said Democrats were so “confounded by the fact that they’ve got to cuss”.
All of this could confuse anyone familiar with Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning films or Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer-winning raps. The hard-collar puritanism to which the authorities pretend sits uneasily with a wider nation that, when it lets itself go, can be more creative with profanity than any other in the Anglosphere.
Which is not to suggest it is Trump’s way with words that has got him off relatively lightly. CNN is on to something with the politics of it all, but, the odd quip from light-night hosts noted, there has been little substantial outrage from the president’s opponents either.
His greatest weapon is exhaustion. Almost nobody has the energy to get annoyed with Trump any more. This may not be a terrible thing when it comes to “salty language” on the front lawn. It’s everything else he does that matters.
