President Donald Trump has long been notable for his public use of profanity. But his use of vulgar language, personal insults and self-aggrandizing rhetoric has increased markedly in his second term, according to a Washington Post analysis of Trump’s speeches and social media posts.
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Trump’s use of profanity and other crude or demeaning language — including insults such as “low IQ,” which he routinely hurls at political opponents — has risen over time. In the first 1½ years of his first presidency, about 40 percent of his speeches contained at least one vulgar term, compared with about 93 percent in his second term. And the number of vulgar or insulting social media posts has roughly tripled during his second term, compared with a similar period in his first term.
The increasingly coarse rhetoric reflects what historians and presidential scholars describe as a more openly combative second term — one defined by rapid-fire executive actions, public threats against perceived enemies, and a governing style rooted in dominance and confrontation.
Trump has openly disparaged political opponents, threatened retribution against critics and deployed federal officers to cities led by Democrats — sometimes with deadly consequences. Through it all, he has used vulgar language to frame his actions.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in one. Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!” Trump posted to Truth Social on April 5 — Easter Sunday — as the war in Iran and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz drove up gas prices and lowered his approval ratings.
A month later, speaking before supporters in Florida, Trump directed his ire at whoever was in charge of his microphone.
“Turn up the mic!” he barked. “I don’t believe in paying people that do a bad job. … I’m screaming my ass off.”
Trump has made direct, even crude, speech a part of his personal brand, framing his bluntness as a sign of authenticity that he says more-scripted politicians lack. He has consistently said he voices what other people are afraid to say out loud.
Trump’s language “meshes with a very aggressive presidency,” said Julian Zelizer, a Princeton historian who studies presidential rhetoric. Trump is easily the most publicly profane president in American history, he said.
“President Trump does use the language to intimidate, to threaten, to attack his opponents,” Zelizer said. “And so a curse is more than just a curse. In certain respects, it can be a way to send a very chilling signal to someone who is not supportive of him or threatening him about how angry he is … because now he has a record that he’s willing to go far to stop that person.”
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales characterized the president’s speech as evidence of his authenticity.
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“President Trump doesn’t care about being politically correct, he cares about Making America Great Again,” Wales said. “The American people love how authentic, transparent, and effective the President is, which is why he won in a massive landslide victory on November 5, 2024.”
The analysis paints a portrait of a president whose rhetoric has become increasingly coarse and sprawling, punctuated by angry late-night posts and public remarks that often veer into extended tangents and improvisational detours.
Among the findings:
Historically, presidents and presidential candidates have aspired to soaring rhetoric and avoided public use of obscenities or crude language. Modern presidents employ teams of speechwriters to lend their words discipline, precision and gravitas.
Earlier presidents generally treated profanity as something to be concealed from public view, not deployed as part of a political persona. Richard M. Nixon was so embarrassed by the profanity captured on his Oval Office tapes during the Watergate scandal that transcripts replaced many of the president’s four-letter words with the now-famous phrase “expletive deleted.”
In his 1990 memoir, Nixon acknowledged the public shock over the recordings. “Most people swear at one time or another,” he wrote, “but since neither I nor most other Presidents had ever used profanity in public, millions were shocked.”
As vice president, Joe Biden once remarked to President Barack Obama that the passage of the Affordable Care Act was a “big fucking deal.” A few years later, as president, Biden was caught on a hot mic saying a reporter was a “stupid son of a bitch.”
Trump’s use of profane language may help consolidate support from his base, but it can also be a liability, Zelizer noted. After Trump’s profanity-laden message to Iran, Democrats started saying the vice president and the Cabinet should use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
“Sometimes when you sound like you’re debasing the language so much, it undermines how much people respect you,” Zelizer said. “It can leave voters, allies and opponents here and overseas thinking: This person is not a great leader. This person is almost desperate, because this is how they speak, and they’re not so … much better than the rest of us.”
Methodology
The Washington Post analyzed Trump’s social media posts and speeches in the first year and a half of both of his presidencies. Posts through May 17, and speeches through May 11 are included in this analysis. Speech transcripts are from Factbase and include official remarks, excluding shorter appearances and press briefings. Posts were sourced from the Trump Twitter Archive and Truth Social. The Post searched for more than two dozen profane and other insulting or vulgar terms, such as “low IQ,” “deranged” and “loser,” in his posts and speeches. The Post searched for such language across all of Trump’s original posts to Truth Social and Twitter/X containing text and used the same dataset to track his use of first-person pronouns. All time data for posts reflect U.S. Eastern time. To measure derailment in speeches, The Post programmatically scored how closely related consecutive sections of each speech were in meaning. When two sections were sufficiently different — and Trump didn’t return to the original topic within five minutes — it was counted as a derailment.
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