Four-letter words were flying everywhere. One speaker flipped his middle finger at the opposition. Another made what was interpreted as an oral sex joke regarding Vice President Kamala Harris. Another suggested she was a prostitute. Still another discussed the supposed sexual habits of Latinos rather explicitly.
All in all, former President Donald J. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday was a cornucopia of crudeness, punctuated by the kind of language that once would have been unthinkable for a gathering held to promote the candidacy of a would-be president of the United States. But among the many lines that Mr. Trump has obliterated in his time in politics is the invisible boundary between propriety and profanity.
Mr. Trump has always been more prone than any of his predecessors in the White House to publicly use what were once called dirty words. But in his third campaign for the presidency, his speeches have grown coarser and coarser. Altogether, according to a computer search, Mr. Trump has used words that would have once gotten a kid’s mouth washed out with soap at least 140 times in public this year. Counting tamer four-letter words like “damn” and “hell,” he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times in 2024.
What minimal self-restraint Mr. Trump once showed in his public discourse has evaporated. A recent New York Times analysis of his public comments this year showed that he uses such language 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran for president in 2016. He sometimes acknowledges that he knows he should not but quickly adds that he cannot help himself.
He often relates that Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader and son of the Rev. Billy Graham, has chided the former president about his language. “I wrote him back,” Mr. Trump said at a rally this month where he discussed the golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis size and invited the crowd to shout out a four-letter word to describe Ms. Harris. “I said, I’m going to try to do that, but actually, the stories won’t be as good. Because you can’t put the same emphasis on it. So tonight, I broke my rule.”
The crowd typically does not mind; quite the opposite. The thousands on hand at Madison Square Garden cheered and laughed at the F-bombs, S-bombs and other bombs thrown out by the various speakers and warm-up acts for Mr. Trump. It clearly is part of the testosterone-driven appeal: Real men curse. Mr. Trump is a real man. What they want is a real man for president.
In total, a computer search of 17 of the speakers at Madison Square Garden found epithets used at least 43 times. One of the most prolific was Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host. “What a sick son of a bitch,” he said of Hillary Clinton. “The whole fucking party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters and lowlives. Every one of them.”
Scott LoBaido, an artist, flipped the bird to the Democrats and called Mr. Trump “the greatest fucking president in the world.”
Tony Hinchcliffe, the comic who made insulting jokes about Latino sexual practices, likewise disparaged Jews and Palestinians and called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” the only comment the Trump campaign later disavowed.
Mr. Trump himself was somewhat more reticent at Madison Square Garden, deploying an “ass,” a couple of “damns,” eight “hells” and a “shit.” But at other recent rallies, he has called Ms. Harris “a shit vice president” and used the same word at a Catholic charity dinner in front of New York’s cardinal.
At one appearance in February before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump spiced his speech with no fewer than 44 epithets. “I got indicted four times by this gang of thugs for nothing, or as I say respectfully to the people from foreign countries, for bullshit,” he said at one point.
The computer analysis showed that Mr. Trump’s use of curses has been on the rise particularly in the past few months as the campaign heated up. But Mr. Trump, now 78, did not resort to such language nearly as much during the final months of the 2020 campaign, according to the analysis, and some experts point to his increased profanity as an example of “disinhibition,” a trait often found with aging as people become less restrained in what they say.
By comparison, Ms. Harris, 60, is practically prim in public. The computer search found only 10 instances of her using a swearword in public this year, most of them “damn” or “hell.” At one forum in May, she did suggest that young people who run into obstacles “need to kick that fucking door down.”
President Biden is a little freer with his tongue, using such language 450 times, but all but two of them were “damn” and “hell.” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate, mocked Elon Musk last week for “skipping like a dipshit” onstage while promoting Mr. Trump.
Neither Mr. Biden nor Ms. Harris is all that reticent to swear behind the scenes. Asked last month what her favorite curse word was, Ms. Harris laughed and said she could not say but “it starts with an M and ends with ‘uh.’” In his new book, “War,” Bob Woodward quotes Ms. Harris telling an associate that Mr. Biden is comfortable with her “because he knows that I’m the only person around who knows how to properly pronounce the word ‘motherfucker.’”
But both she and Mr. Biden generally follow the old rules that such language is inappropriate in public from the mouth of the president or vice president, who are in theory supposed to be role models for the next generation. Presidents who strayed were usually called on the carpet and often apologized.
President Harry S. Truman pushed the boundaries when a supporter told him to “give ’em hell, Harry” and he replied: “I don’t give them hell. I just tell the truth about them and they think it’s hell.” When he talked about “manure” at a horticulture show, a scandalized friend of his wife, Bess, asked if she could get him to use a less salacious word. “Heavens, no,” Mrs. Truman said. “It took me 25 years to get him to say ‘manure.’”
Many Americans were shocked by secret tapes that showed Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon cussing up a storm in private, but both of them knew to keep their mouths clean in public. President George H.W. Bush actually apologized for calling Bill Clinton and Al Gore “two bozos” on the campaign trail after complaints that it was ungentlemanly.
But hot mics have caught presidents and vice presidents in more scatological moments. George W. Bush, while running for president, was overheard calling a New York Times reporter a “major-league asshole.” Vice President Dick Cheney got in hot water for telling a Democratic senator on the floor to “go fuck yourself.” And Mr. Biden as vice president was caught on a microphone telling President Barack Obama that passage of his health care program was a “big fucking deal.”
With Mr. Trump, though, profanity is a feature not a bug. And he has lowered the bar so much that his allies regularly throw out words not permitted on broadcast television. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and other Republicans shouted “bullshit” at Mr. Biden during a State of the Union address, a breach of decorum that would have shocked Mr. Truman and the older Mr. Bush. She and her far-right compatriots regularly question whether less aggressive Republicans have testicles.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has institutionalized the insults. It regularly questions Mr. Walz’s manhood, for instance, because of legislation he once signed directing Minnesota schools to provide menstrual products to all students who need them.
When Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, mentioned Mr. Walz’s name at Sunday’s rally, the crowd picked up the cause without even being prompted, chanting “Tampon Tim! Tampon Tim!” Mr. Vance laughed and smiled broadly. “You all can say that,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t say that.”
Whatever caution that may have demonstrated, Mr. Vance made clear he was not bothered by the language of the rest of the event. Asked during a stop in Wisconsin on Monday about the crude references and attempts at humor at Madison Square Garden, he brushed them off. “I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America,” he said. “I’m just — I’m so over it.”
He argued that the Democrats were the ones who were truly offensive by comparing Sunday’s rally to one held by Nazis at a previous version of Madison Square Garden in 1939.
Then he called Ms. Harris a “dipshit.”
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