Roll Call - Lyndon B. Johnson spoke with ... florid profanity.... but reporters in those days cleaned up his language. It was, perhaps, a gentler time.
Still, Trump is the first to say it on the record in front of cameras, according to a check of the Roll Call Factba.se database, which includes our own transcripts from 2017 forward, and full copies of the Compilation of Presidential Documents and the Public Papers of the President, which go back to 1929.
For good measure, we also double-checked The American Presidency Project. That data does not include hot mics, leaked recording or bowdlerized pool reports from an era when the White House enjoyed a chummier relationship with the press.
We also have at least 22 instances of Trump saying the f-word on the record (or on “Access Hollywood”) when he wasn’t president, between 2004 and 2024.
He’s used the term six times on Truth Social, but those were all reposts or posts quoting others. Same with X; he uses the term 20 times there, but only in retweets.
Still, the attention Trump got for letting his f-bomb fly got our puerile minds wondering: How many times has that particular curse been entered into the Congressional Record?
After all, the congressional swear jar is far from empty. Democrats in particular have cursed quite a blue streak lately.
We managed to find seven instances where the f-word and its various inflections were spoken on the House or Senate floor. In all these cases, the word was being quoted, like when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recounted being cursed out by then-Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., on the Capitol steps in 2020, or then-Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, D-N.H., describing what a young man in the throes of addiction said in 2016.
We found another 34 times a version of the word was entered into the record via a submitted writing, like a news article or transcript of a video, almost all of which were related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
We also found 27 committee hearing records with actual “fucks,” with some of those records including multiple incidents. Many were, again, found in items submitted in writing for the record, but others were found in congressional depositions, including 10 from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
1 comment:
The only time I ever the eff word at a public hearing was when I was talking about the expansion of the local airport at the same time the state was cutting bus service and called it fucking stupid. A local progressive minister came up to me after the hearing and said he did not like people using that word at a hearing, but in this case it was exactly the right thing to say.
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