Kamala Harris — the ‘sweariest’ president?

A British newspaper said this week said that Kamala Harris is “on track to be the sweariest president in U.S. history,” recounting the vice president’s history of public cursing, including some words that she admits she has been told not to say in interviews.
It’s a list that, in times past, might have been a problem for a politician, particularly one whose candidacy is built around optimism and joy. Swearing is often associated with anger, which puts Harris’s colorful vocabulary at odds with her persona. It also might put her at odds with some of the voters she is attempting to court, who might rather not have a president given to firing off an expletive to make a point.
According to Tom Teodorczuk, writing for The Telegraph, Harris’s profanities include saying to a gathering of young people in May: “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 (expletive) door down.”
He continued: “In an interview with Rolling Stone in June, referring to arguments in the Supreme Court over emergency abortions following the Court overturning Roe v Wade in 2022, Harris said: ‘It’s (expletive) up.’ In the same interview she acknowledged her escalating expletive count: ‘What have I done differently since I’ve been in this office? I curse more.’”
She also told Rolling Stone that her reaction aloud to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was “Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.”
The Telegraph noted that Harris has used profanities to refer to Donald Trump — some people think she almost let one slip during their debate before substituting the words “former president.” And she appears to use profanity in casual conversation, at one time telling her niece, “You need to learn how to (expletive) cook!’”
It is the kind of language that might have rankled a large number of voters in the past, and could have been opportunity for Republicans to call her out on it — except for the fact that many Republicans aren’t much better. Last year, writing for National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke wrote a column critical of Joe Biden that was built around an expletive. Megyn Kelly is among prominent conservative personalities who curses freely on her podcast, which airs during the day, a time when many parents may have young children with them. Kelly has said of her post-Fox News freedom, “I (expletive) love the swearing” — and many of her guests clearly do, too.
In fact, people who object to profanity in public — and yes, we still exist — may be concluding at this point that the battle is lost, that the vulgarians are no longer at the gate, but have moved in and are doing their laundry. A Deseret News/HarrisX poll found that 68% of the oldest Americans — those 65 and older — say hearing profanity in public bothers them “a lot” or “some,” but most young Americans aren’t troubled by it. Nearly three-quarters of the youngest adults said profanity use doesn’t bother them at all, or only a little — which helps to explain why Harris got a laugh at her “kick that door down” remark, and praise from the author of a book about the history of swearing.
“It was a masterclass in how to swear. It was boring until she said, ‘kick that (expletive) door down’, and then she started laughing – and everybody else laughed. She grabbed their attention – it was a great example of what swearing can do,” Melissa Mohr told The Telegraph.
If swearing is what enlivens a boring speech, best not let the kids stay up for the first State of the Union delivered by Harris, the sweariest president, if she in fact wins.
Personally, I prefer to live in a world where a speech is made interesting by the ideas expressed, not by the expletives inserted. And that goes for speech on the internet as well. There, while profanity is used by both Republicans and Democrats, and the incidence is rising, there’s a notable difference in how often it is used, according to research by Quorum.
Per the Telegraph, Quorum found “US congressional politicians deployed the f-word 205 times last year on X (formerly Twitter), including retweets, compared with zero times in 2015.”
Despite the “linguistic belligerence” of Trump and other profanity-prone Republicans, Teodorczuk wrote, Democrat lawmakers out-cussed Republican lawmakers on the platform: 161-70 with one particular expletive, 620-472 with another. It’s a small victory perhaps for those in the party whose standard-bearers swear less than the other, but in this environment, until further notice, celebrate everything.