Presidential Obscenities

President Donald Trump issued a new threat to Iran on Sunday, using three obscenities in one sentence in exasperation with Iran’s ongoing terrorism against civilian ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

A number of presidents in the modern era are known to have used profanity in private and in meetings, but they conspicuously avoided it in public, fearing loss of support from the American people, whether Republican or Democrat.

• As Jonathan Turley noted in his February 28 column, as recently as President Trump’s first term, it was a shock and a minor scandal to hear someone using profanity who even just represented the presidency, let alone the president himself.

But President Trump, while enjoying the support of conservatives generally and Christians specifically, has regularly used foul language publicly and created a “new normal.”

It is a sharp contrast from a certain one of his predecessors:

The general is sorry to be informed that the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing, a vice hitherto little known in our American Army, is growing into fashion. He hopes that the officers will, by example as well as influence, endeavor to check it and that both they and the men will reflect that we can little hope of the blessing of heaven on our army if we insult it by our impiety and folly. Added to this, it is a vice so mean and low without any temptation that every man of sense and character detests and despises it.
—Gen. George Washington, 1776

But few Americans today seem to care.

During the Bill Clinton adultery and deception scandal, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry and executive editor Stephen Flurry wrote in Character in Crisis: “When Americans go from proclaiming that a free society can only exist when founded on private morality to thinking that character doesn’t matter, it is time to ask some hard questions about the future of this nation.”