Do people like it when politicians swear?
Donald Trump upended a number of firm assumptions that many of us long held about American politics. In most cases for worse, I think. But there is one key lesson about Trump’s success that I hope the U.S. political class learns: It’s OK to drop the F-bomb every once in a while.
My boy Beto O’Rourke seems to have learned:
Throughout the day, O’Rourke talked up his “people driven” campaign for Senate, eschewed big money and party labels and emphasized job creation. He even dropped a few f-bombs in front of a crowd of beer-drinkers at a bar in Dallas.
Similarly, a profile of Kirsten Gillibrand in New York Magazine has the junior senator and potential 2020 presidential candidate casually dropping it thrice:
…She describes waking in the middle of the night, fretting over a friend’s daughter who’d tried to sell her Girl Scout cookies: “Oh my God, I’ve got to fucking order those cookies. I’m terrible! I didn’t respond properly!
…In early March, Collins and Gillibrand filed legislation to protect seniors against fraud, and Gillibrand hopes to persuade Collins to become a Republican co-sponsor of the Family Act, Gillibrand’s big paid-family-leave bill. “I know Susan’s worldview is similar to my worldview,” says Gillibrand. “Which is that we’re here to help people, and if we’re not helping people, we should go the fuck home.”
…When she first got to the Senate and started working on the 9/11 health bill (which her chief of staff had warned would be a tough sell — people thought New York was wealthy enough to pay for its own), she relied on the women around her for help. “To pass that bill, I first went to my female colleagues and said, ‘How do I do this? I have no fucking clue,’ ” she says.
So are Gillibrand and O’Rourke being genuine, and letting their guard down, or is letting a few F-bombs fly a rhetorical strategy to convey authenticity?
It’s hard to say. It could be a mixture of both. Either way, I’m a fan. The crap that campaign consultants have cooked up through supposedly evidence-based social science (polls, focus groups) has worn thin on the electorate, and nothing shows that better than Trump’s win.
In fact, I thought one of Hillary’s worst ads was the one in which she tried to make a big deal out of a clip of Trump saying at a rally “tell them to go fuck themselves.” Trump has done and said lots of horrible things that most of us wouldn’t do or say. So why attack him for saying one of the few things that nearly all of us have said? By the way, the target of Trump’s F-bomb, which was not included in the ad but just a Google search away for any interested viewer, were companies that were offshoring manufacturing jobs. By telling them to “go fuck themselves,” Trump is doing what many of us only dream of telling our bosses.
