WASHINGTON — It’s not every day that you get to see a politician — let alone a president — give a “f---.”

But that’s just what President Donald Trump did on Tuesday. The ceasefire between Israel and Iran he had announced the night before seemed to be already unraveling, and a visibly irritated Trump expressed his frustrations in profane terms.

“We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f--- they’re doing,” he said to reporters and in front of news cameras.

This isn’t the first time Trump has cursed on camera, but it is the first time a sitting president used the ultimate naughty word on the record. Candidate Trump frequently seasoned his speeches with salty language, even saying “shit,” at a Catholic charity fundraiser.

Trump is hardly the first vulgarian-in-chief.

Lyndon B. Johnson spoke with such florid profanity, it would’ve made David Mamet blush, but reporters in those days cleaned up his language. It was, perhaps, a gentler time.

Still, Trump is the first to say it on the record in front of cameras, according to a check of the Roll Call Factba.se database, which includes our own transcripts from 2017 forward, and full copies of the Compilation of Presidential Documents and the Public Papers of the President, which go back to 1929.

For good measure, we also double-checked the American Presidency Project. That data does not include hot-mics, leaked recording or bowdlerized pool reports from an era when the White House enjoyed a chummier relationship with the press.

We also have at least 22 instances of Trump saying the f-word on the record (or on “Access Hollywood”) when he wasn’t president, between 2004 and 2024.

He’s used the term six times on TruthSocial, but those were all reposts or posts quoting others. Same with X; he uses the term 20 times there, but only in retweets.

Still, the attention Trump got for letting his f-bomb fly got our puerile minds wondering: How many times has that particular curse been entered into the Congressional Record?

After all, the congressional swear jar is far from empty. Democrats in particular have cursed quite a blue streak lately.

We managed to find seven instances where the f-word and its various inflections were spoken on the House or Senate floor. In all these cases, the word was being quoted, like when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recounted being cursed out by then-Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., on the Capitol steps in 2020, or then-Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, D-N.H., describing what a young man in the throes of addiction said in 2016.

We found another 34 times a version of the word was entered into the record via a submitted writing, like a news article or transcript of a video, almost all of which were related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

We also found 27 committee hearing records with actual “f---s,” with some of those records including multiple incidents. Many were, again, found in items submitted in writing for the record, but others were found in congressional depositions, including 10 from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.

Those documents come from CQ Roll Call’s Congressional Record database, which dates back to Jan. 25, 1994, and also includes comprehensive hearing coverage from January 2010 to the present and ad hoc coverage before then. That study includes only verbal statements made by members of Congress and only in cases where they were not quoting from a document.

All of these figures exclude any remarks that might have been uttered on the floor or in a hearing but were subsequently stricken from the record, usually after a colleague raises a point of order asking for their “words to be taken down” in keeping with congressional rules of decorum.

_____

(Bill Frischling of Roll Call Factba.se contributed data reporting.)

_____

©2025 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.