Turns out the future of American political communication is just saying "shit" on camera and calling it authenticity. Axios reports that politicians across the spectrum are abandoning scripted language and leaning into public profanity as a deliberate rhetorical strategy. This is not an accident. This is the plan.
The Strategy Is Exactly What It Looks Like
According to Axios, the shift toward political profanity is intentional. Politicians are cursing more because it works — it projects authenticity, signals confrontation, and most importantly, it screams "I am not one of those people" to a base that has spent a decade being told Washington is broken.
Nick Beauchamp, a professor at Northeastern University who studies political rhetoric, told Axios plainly: "There's this dissatisfaction and anti-establishment fervor that's been present for probably at least a decade now." Which is a very academic way of saying people are furious and politicians have noticed that swearing makes you look like you're furious too.
This is, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, a completely logical response to the incentives in modern politics. Voters distrust polish. They distrust talking points. They distrust anyone who sounds like they rehearsed their answer in front of a mirror at six in the morning. Dropping an f-bomb tells the crowd: I am unfiltered, I am real, I am one of you.
A Decade of Rage Looking for a Vocabulary
Let's put some context around this. The anti-establishment wave that Beauchamp is describing didn't come from nowhere. It built slowly through the Tea Party years, exploded with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both running insurgent campaigns in 2016, and has never really cooled down since. The institutions people were furious at — Congress, the media, the financial system, the professional political class — didn't exactly do a lot between 2016 and now to make people less furious.
So here we are. The rhetorical tools that worked in a more stable political environment, the careful hedging, the passive-voice non-answers, the "I appreciate the question" stall tactics, those tools now actively signal exactly what a chunk of the electorate hates most. They signal a politician who has been trained not to say anything real.
Profanity, in this context, isn't vulgarity. It's a signal. It's a costume that says "outsider" even when the person wearing it has been in Washington for twenty years. It is, when you strip away the words themselves, just another form of political theater. Louder and more aggressive political theater, but theater nonetheless.
Trump Wrote the Playbook Everyone Is Now Stealing
You cannot talk about this trend without talking about Donald Trump, who spent a decade demonstrating that the old rules about what a politician could say in public were not actually rules at all. They were just norms. And norms, it turned out, had no enforcement mechanism.
Trump did not invent political vulgarity, but he industrialized it. He took something that used to end careers — a hot mic moment, an unscripted expletive, a rally riff that went too far — and turned it into a signature. The people who were supposed to be horrified by it weren't horrified. Or enough of them weren't. And politicians on both sides of the aisle spent the years since doing what politicians always do when something works: they started copying it.
The question Axios is implicitly raising, even if they're being polite about it, is whether this is a symptom of something genuinely broken in how Americans relate to their political leaders. When the most effective way to signal that you're trustworthy is to sound like you're in a bad mood at a bar, that's not really a communications strategy. That's a measurement of how far trust has collapsed.
Authenticity as a Performance
Here is the thing about using profanity to signal authenticity: it immediately stops being authentic. The moment a political consultant tells a candidate that dropping a well-placed expletive in a town hall will help with working-class voters, that expletive is no longer unfiltered. It's just a different kind of script.
This is the core absurdity of the whole trend. Voters are rejecting politicians who seem performative and fake, so politicians have developed a new performance designed to seem less fake. They have optimized their spontaneity. They have workshopped their rawness. Someone, somewhere, has almost certainly A/B tested which specific profanities poll best in which specific media markets.
Beauchamp's research at Northeastern is tracking something real, but what it's tracking is not politicians becoming more honest. It's politicians becoming more sophisticated about how they manufacture the appearance of honesty. Which, depending on your level of optimism about American democracy, is either slightly better or considerably worse than the alternative.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to hear a politician say "damn right" at a rally and feel like you've glimpsed the real person underneath the suit. What you're actually watching is a communications strategy that was road-tested, refined, and greenlit by someone with a polling spreadsheet open on their second monitor. The profanity is the press release. It just sounds angrier.
None of this is to say the underlying anger isn't real. It absolutely is. Beauchamp is right that this anti-establishment fervor has been building for over a decade, and it has real causes: wages, housing, healthcare, a political class that spent years telling people the economy was fine when the economy was clearly not fine for most of the people in it. That rage deserves to go somewhere. It deserves actual policy responses, actual accountability, actual change. What it's getting instead is politicians who have learned to weaponize the sound of being fed up while changing almost nothing structural about how they operate.
So sure, let them swear. Let them perform their authenticity at full volume. Just don't mistake the volume for the substance. The most dangerous thing about this trend isn't that politicians are cursing in public. It's that cursing in public has apparently become enough. That's the tell. Not the profanity itself. The fact that it works.
Comments