President Trump was back in Pennsylvania last week to tout his economic record, but one of the lines that drew attention had nothing to do with jobs or inflation. He revived a crude slur he used in 2018, when he called several poor nations “s**thole countries” during a White House meeting with lawmakers. At the time, the president denied having used such language, but at the rally on Tuesday he boasted of it. The contrast was striking: A vulgarity that dominated the national conversation seven years ago generated little more than a ripple today.

A day earlier, another elected official’s vulgarity was in the news. According to an investigation made public last week, Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican now running for governor, erupted in a profanity-laced tirade at TSA officers in Charleston’s airport in October. She called them “f***ing idiots” who were “f***ing incompetent,” snapped that she was “sick of your s**t,” and proclaimed herself a “f***ing representative.” The details are tawdry, but what’s more telling is how unexceptional the whole episode feels. Members of Congress hurling obscenities at public employees (or at a constituent) used to be unthinkable. In 2025, it’s just one more bit of political color.

These two stories, arriving within 48 hours of each other, aren’t identical. Trump’s four-letter words are provocations, part of the persona he has cultivated for years. Mace’s outburst was a temper tantrum. But both reflect a dispiriting shift in American public life: The coarsest language is no longer a breach of decorum. Increasingly, it is a credential.

Across the political spectrum, a growing number of strategists and candidates have embraced the idea that foul language demonstrates authenticity. Democrats frustrated by years of political stalemate release campaign ads vowing to “unf*** our country” or urging their party to “grow a f***ing spine.” Younger members of Congress cultivate a “tell-it-like-it-is” persona by seasoning interviews with obscenities that are likely to go viral on TikTok. Trump, never one for euphemism, has long leaned on vulgarity and insults as a way to signal blunt honesty and disdain for polite opinion. His opponents now imitate the technique, hoping that their gutter language will persuade voters they are just as real, just as angry, and just as fed up as they are.

The common assumption behind all this is that decorum is a kind of deceit. The way to prove you are sincere, we are told, is to blast through the old boundaries. In a politics that rewards spectacle, profanity itself becomes a marker of frankness.

This potty-mouthing didn’t originate with politics. Filthy language has always existed, but only in recent decades have the most vulgar swear words in the English language become so unrelenting and ubiquitous. Their spread is both a symptom and a driver of a broader cultural coarsening — one the internet has accelerated to warp speed.

A linguistic study published this year analyzed 1.8 million web pages (comprising roughly 1.7 billion words) of online content; researchers found that Americans use more profanity online than any other English-speaking nation. That isn’t because we’re uniquely furious or uneducated. It is because American-dominated digital platforms reward whatever provokes attention, and few things do so more reliably than four-letter words. The algorithms built to maximize “engagement” boost high-intensity language. So high-intensity language proliferates.

The effect can be seen across the cultural landscape. Hit songs with explicitly profane names abound; Spotify’s playlist of “songs with swear words in the title” runs to 382 tracks.

Publishers, too, have long since embraced obscenity as marketing. Books with expletives in their titles sell briskly. In an article seven years ago, Slate asked: “Why Are There So Many F**king Best-sellers Right Now With F**k in the Title?” It was ironic, the online magazine noted, that those supposedly shocking foul-mouthed book titles had become “so prevalent that it’s hard to imagine being shocked by them.”

Add to all that the profusion of foul language in Hollywood films, contemporary plays, and TV shows, and it becomes clear how thoroughly profanity has been mainstreamed in the culture.

The uglier our public vocabulary becomes, the more normal the ugliness seems; the more normal it seems, the more it crowds out non-ugly alternatives. What once felt like a wrenching breach of decorum now reads simply as the price of admission to modern discourse.

Swearing can, of course, feel satisfying. Everyone knows the small emotional jolt an expletive can deliver when you stub a toe or watch someone cut across three lanes of traffic. In rare moments, a sharp, salty word really does capture urgency better than anything in the polite lexicon. But we’ve stopped treating the strongest language as strong at all. Words that once conveyed intensity or real emotion are now scattered everywhere. The effect is like that of drenching every meal in hot sauce. The heat overwhelms the dish; the subtler, more interesting flavors never have a chance.

That would be regrettable even in private life. In public life, it is worse. Every society relies on verbal self-restraint — not because we are delicate but because we share the space our words create. We ban smoking in restaurants not because a single cigarette is catastrophic but because over time smoking pollutes the environment everyone moves through. We expect dog owners to pick up after their pets for the same reason. Ubiquitous profanity works the same way. It degrades our instincts, making the ambient sound of daily life harsher than it needs to be.

Despite what the political consultants and podcast hosts insist, there is evidence that many Americans haven’t embraced the f-bombing of public space. A Pew survey this year found that two-thirds of adults say it is rarely or never acceptable to display swear words on clothing, and roughly the same share consider cursing in public offensive. The hunger for nonstop coarseness may be less widespread than the culture implies.

A politics or culture that defaults to profanity is not deepening its honesty; it is narrowing its expressive range. When leaders and celebrities treat four-letter words as badges of candor, they don’t elevate the public conversation, they just make it meaner. Anyone can drop an f-bomb. It’s what people do when they don’t have a better argument.