When the White House gets salty: Trump, Biden and presidential profanity
By Donald Judd, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s frustrations with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro spilled into public view during a White House meeting with Ukraine’s leader Friday, which saw Trump trade military strikes in the Caribbean for an f-bomb in the Cabinet Room.
Pressed on reporting from The New York Times that Venezuela had approached administration officials with a proposal to offer preferential access to its natural resources in exchange for lowering the temperature between the two nations, Trump told reporters Maduro has “offered everything.”
“You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States,” he said.
Blue language at the White House is rare, but it’s not the first time Trump has deployed that specific expletive to vent his annoyance over diplomatic challenges
In June, following the news Israel and Iran violated a temporary ceasefire agreement brokered by the US, Trump told reporters on the White House South Lawn, “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long, and so hard, that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
Trump has shrugged off many norms as president, and often used coarse or politically incorrect language, both as president and as a presidential candidate — in 2018, he decried immigrants coming to the US from what he called “shithole countries,” behind closed doors, later using the same curse to describe the District of Columbia during a 2024 campaign rally in Iowa.
But he’s hardly the first prominent politician to deploy the f-word or other expletives from their off-color arsenal in public.
Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, raised eyebrows when, during a 2010 press conference with then-President Barack Obama, he was caught telling Obama passage of the Affordable Care Act was a “big fucking deal.”
Democrats later used the gaffe to raise money for the Democratic National Committee.
Later, as president, Biden was again caught on a hot mic calling a reporter in the White House press pool “a stupid son of a bitch,” for asking a question he didn’t like, though he later called the reporter to apologize.
Obama too raised eyebrows when, during an off-the-record portion of a 2009 interview with CNBC, he called rapper Kanye West “a jackass” after West rushed the MTV stage during Taylor Swift’s speech accepting the award for best female music video of the year.
And in 2004, then-Vice President Dick Cheney told Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy to “go fuck yourself” on the Senate floor during Senate picture day after Leahy accused the vice president of war profiteering.
Using profanity on the Senate floor is against the chamber’s rules, but Cheney skirted a violation because the Senate was not in session, a Senate official told CNN at the time.
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