As one might expect from a Democrat, President Biden isn’t afraid to work blue.
Politico reported Thursday that Biden — once caught on a hot mic calling the passage of ObamaCare a “big f—ing deal” — regularly uses profanity in meetings with West Wing aides, displaying a particular fondness for “f—.”
Variations on the theme, according to the outlet’s West Wing Playbook email newsletter, include the phrases “f— them,” “What the f— are we doing?” and “Why the f— isn’t this happening?”. However, the report adds, Biden never uses the four-letter word as a verb.
When he feels like mixing it up, the president reportedly resorts to “bulls—” (occasionally telling aides, “don’t bulls— a bulls—-er”) and the tried and true “dammit.”
Despite Biden’s seemingly gratuitous use of curse words, Politico quoted sources as claiming that the president is self-conscious about swearing around the fairer sex.
“When he cusses around women, it is always, and I mean always, followed by an immediate apology,” one said.
“He’s from a different generation but if there’s people that are younger than him, especially women, he feels like, ‘Hey, how would I feel if I was cussing around my daughter or my granddaughter?’” added another. “You don’t cuss in front of women and children.”
That may be news to Vice President Kamala Harris, who told NowThis News in 2019 that her favorite curse word “starts with an ‘m’ and it ends with ‘ah.’
“Not ‘er,’” she added to drive home the point.
Presidential profanity is nothing new. Richard Nixon, for example, made the phrase “expletive deleted” part of the national lexicon when he insisted that words he found offensive be excised from transcripts of Oval Office conversations that were released during the Watergate scandal.
Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, seemingly offended every sensibility under the sun, regularly using the n-word and describing South Vietnam as “that damn little pissant country” — anticipating Donald Trump’s own rant about “s—hole countries” by approximately five decades.
Even Barack Obama, so often associated with eloquent speech, admitted to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in a 2016 interview for Vanity Fair magazine that “I curse more than I should, and I find myself cursing more in this office than I had in my previous life.”
“Fortunately,” Obama added,” both my chief of staff [Denis McDonough] and my national security adviser [Susan Rice] have even bigger potty mouths than me, so it’s OK.”
As for Biden, Politico reported that some staffers “find Biden’s foul mouth endearing — a part of his everyman appeal that made him president. One former aide noted that’s true just as long as you’re not on the receiving end of it.”