And just like that, Donald Trump ruined something else.
To be fair, Democrats also played a role in spoiling it.
And if we’re being totally honest, the whole thing was on the verge of collapse anyway.
We’re talking about the f-word, of course.
Trump furiously threw it out during a live interview on Tuesday about the Israel-Iran war and followed it up with an emphatic, “Do you understand that?”
The president’s bunker buster f-bomb generated pearl-clutch headlines around the globe (“Breaking Another Presidential Norm,” scolded NPR; “It’s Not Unheard Of,” defended The New York Post; “The Internet Is Losing It,” enthused Buzzfeed). While The New York Times considered Trump’s usage so significant that editors actually printed the word instead of opting for one of their usual polite substitutes (such as saying the speaker “used a vulgar expression” — which typically prompts Times readers to think of many swears as they try to figure out what was censored; like playing some four-letter version of Wordle).
Even before Trump’s viral interview, Democrat leaders had been publicly using the f-word with increasing frequency. In one memorable instance, Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) declared during a rally, “I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to fuck Trump” — which probably was not the best way to phrase that.
But our political leaders cursing into hot mics was really just the final boss of “fuck” becoming so commonplace that it’s lost all its punch and provocation.
You could blame the word’s proliferation of social media for this (one study found that “fuck” was the most commonly tweeted curse word). You might blame the flood of grown-up content on streaming drowning out the PG-rated broadcast networks (last month, streaming finally surpassed both broadcast and cable combined in the Nielsen rankings). You could even point to studies which have shown swearing has health benefits (it boosts our pain tolerance by 33 percent).
You could even blame the mainstream media (everyone else does!) for gradually loosening its standards. The Hollywood Reporter, for instance, has published celebrity profiles over the last couple of years with headlines like “Harrison Ford: ‘I Know Who the F**k I Am,’” “‘John Wick’ Boss Gets Candid: ‘My Process Is F***ed,‘” and “Alex Cooper Is Blowing Up: ‘I’m a Motherf**ker When It Comes to Business.’” And those were just the ones I wrote.
You’ll notice that — like many outlets — we throw in a couple asterisks (**) when putting “fuck” in a headline because we all know that the human brain cannot fill in letters. (Actually, this practice is partly due to a concern that Google might rank a story lower if there is profanity in the display; in the end, our only fear will be offending the robots).
Look, there have been countless hand-wringing essays written about “the coarsening of our language” over the last few centuries or so. But in 2024, the second highest-grossing movie at the box office, Deadpool & Wolverine, reportedly clocked 116 fucks — and it was released by Disney. The studio’s live action Snow White that bombed? Not a single fuck. If Rachel Zegler’s princess had looked at those creepy CG dwarfs and exclaimed, “What the actual fuck are those!?” the film might have done better.
Because it takes Disney’s angelic Snow White saying “fuck” — or the President of the United States, for that matter — to get a little juice out of the word nowadays. We’re so fuck-saturated. Our world is positively brimming with fucks. “Fuck” is supposed to shock, to titillate, to inflame. Now it’s workmanlike. Boring. When it comes to the f-word, we simply have no more fucks left to give.