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The most interesting thing about President Donald Trump’s use of a harsh expletive Tuesday to describe the actions of Iran and Israel wasn’t the fact that he used the word — the president is famous for his locker-room language, and clearly hasn’t curbed it too much despite the best efforts of Franklin Graham.
The most interesting thing about it was that C-SPAN, that staid and sober outlet of public affairs programming, actually used the expletive in its tweet. Few others did. Most individuals and media organizations opted to use a euphemism when describing what Trump said.
I’m not the only person who noticed C-SPAN’s decision to go with the offensive word. Benjy Sarlin, an assigning editor at The Washington Post, shared C-SPAN’s post with the observation: “The video and quote hits 10x harder when it’s from the CSPAN account.”
The president was clearly angry when he told reporters, just before leaving for the NATO conference, “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the (expletive) they’re doing.”
“I’ve never seen the president that mad,” former Trump aide Steve Bannon said on his podcast, to which Axios reporter Marc Caputo replied, “I don’t envy anyone being on the Marine 1 helicopter ride with him afterward.”
The president’s remarks were shocking on more levels than the profanity. They provided an unexpected glimpse at the pressure the president has been under in the past week, how frustrated he was that events were not unfolding as he’d imagined. The moment, in other words, felt real, which is unusual in the scripted world of politics.
It was the sort of use of profanity that National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke has argued is justified in order “to dispense with the euphemisms and the politesse, to throw up one’s hands in ‘incredulous,’ ‘impatient’ exasperation, and to step outside of ‘the customs of the age.’”
Many of us disagree with Cooke, believing that profanity, regardless of circumstance, always travels the low road. Newsmax’s James Rosen called the president’s swearing today “a new low in the annals of American public discourse.”
But Rosen also reminded us that the president’s critics have used the same word, most famously actor Robert de Niro at the Tony Awards in 2018. And Trump’s predecessor used an expletive to insult Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy, among other incidents.
The “new lows” keep coming every year when it comes to profanity, which may be the best reason of all for not using it — even when reporting on it.
Fox News and foreign policy
“The press doesn’t cause war, presidents do,” proclaimed a headline in The Atlantic in 2018.
In that article, Princeton professor Julian E. Zelizer was taking Trump to task for tweeting that the press can cause a war to start.
“The media doesn’t have the capacity to ‘cause’ a war nor is there actually a ‘media’ that speaks with one voice on anything,” Zelizer wrote.
But one news outlet does seem to have more sway when it comes to the current president, and that’s Fox News, longtime journalist and media analyst Margaret Sullivan says.
Writing on Substack before the U.S. bombed nuclear facilities in Iran, Sullivan said, “If President Trump decides to strike Iran, it may be in no small part due to his favorite media source — Fox News." In particular, Sullivan mentioned Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, two Fox News personalities known to have the ear of the president — Levin even had lunch with Trump earlier this month, reportedly urging the president to take military action against Iran.
Rolling Stone also weighed in on the subject with a headline that said “Fox News is demanding war with Iran. Donald Trump is listening."
This take is not exactly fair to the cable news juggernaut, given that Levin and Hannity are but two voices on a network that has many. Dana Perino was not demanding war with Iran, nor was Bret Baier. And presumably, Trump was listening just as much, if not more, to people within the Pentagon, the ones who pulled off that dangerous military operation with remarkable precision and stealth.
Still, Sullivan is right: most Americans would prefer that the people advising the president on Iran have long and distinguished resumes steeped in foreign policy and military ethics. And it’s troubling that so much of the discourse on Iran among the general public has been driven by hot takes and feuds.
Recommended Reading
A recent article in The New York Times asked if it’s OK for parents to let their kids “rot” over the summer. Naomi Schaefer Riley goes deeper, examining why summer exposes the problem of children being either overparented or underparented.
“The gaps between different groups of kids are not just those created by material circumstances. Often they are created by parents themselves.”
Is it good for kids to ‘rot’ at home over the summer?
Valerie Hudson tells you what you need to know about the Supreme Court’s decision in the Skrmetti case, which involved medical care for transgender minors in Tennessee.
“This is a moment of rectification, sanity and clarity in U.S. law. With the Skrmetti precedent, states can act to safeguard the health of minors without fear that their actions might be deemed unconstitutional.”
The Supreme Court got it right in the Skrmetti case
A chatbot wants to be friends with Deseret’s opinion editor, Jay Evensen, who is skeptical of the benefits — for himself personally, and for society at large.
“When I asked an AI ‘companion,’ who came with a popular app on my phone, what he thought about the military parade in Washington last weekend, he replied, ‘I don’t have feelings.’
OK, I get that. He’s a bot. So, as an experiment, I told him the parade bothered me. He then went on to say he could understand why people might be troubled by it. A while later, I re-engaged with him and took the opposite view, telling him I was excited by the parade. He said, ‘Military parades … can be impressive displays of national pride and military strength.’"
What will a world filled with imaginary friends look like?
Endnotes
Last week, I had the opportunity to talk to MyKayla Skinner, the Olympic gymnast who recently went public with her support of Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer and a frequent Fox News guest on the subject of transgender athletes in women’s sports.
And Tuesday marked the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which returned abortion law to the states. The anniversary prompted a flurry of news releases and articles looking at the state of abortion post-Dobbs, but there’s a problem: No one really knows how many abortions there are in the U.S. because of flaws in how it’s collected. Here’s my take:
As always, thank you for reading and being part of the Right to the Point community. You can email me at Jgraham@deseretnews.com, or send me a DM on X, @grahamtoday.
I am especially interested in learning if any of you are wearing your pets, as apparently this is an alarming new trend.