This Is Not How Presidents Typically Communicate
When Theodore Roosevelt marveled that he possessed “such a bully pulpit,” he used bully to mean wonderful or superb. Donald Trump’s schoolyard taunts and wartime bombast have turned the presidential podium into a platform for threatening harm or intimidating enemies, especially ones deemed inferior—a very different definition of bully.
Once again, the 47th president has added a new entry on his long list of unprecedented acts. Other chief executives have cursed like the sailors or Army veterans they were before becoming U.S. commanders in chief. Harry Truman possessed a hair-trigger temper and an earthy vocabulary. John F. Kennedy used colorful descriptions gleaned from his father and from his time as a naval officer. Richard Nixon’s taped conversations captured his profanity-laced conversations with staff, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s vulgarities are infamous. Yet these chief executives typically confined their blue language to private exchanges.
But yesterday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Trump’s Easter Sunday blast at the Iranians thus offered a stark contrast with even his most profane predecessors.
All previous presidents have wanted to appear serious, dignified, and statesmanlike when speaking to their fellow Americans and the world about war. Not every commander in chief can rival Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—or even Franklin D. Roosevelt describing Japan’s “unprovoked and dastardly attack on Sunday, December 7, 1941” as a “day that will live in infamy”—but the others have all tried.
[Donald Moynihan: Donald Trump has built a clicktatorship]
Kennedy’s 1962 televised speech revealing the Soviet Union’s placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba, capable of reaching most of America’s major cities, announced a naval quarantine against any ships carrying offensive weapons to the island, 90 miles from Florida’s coast. In clear, diplomatic, and eloquent language, he called on the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev “to halt, and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between” the United States and the U.S.S.R. “I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination,” Kennedy said, “and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man.”
After a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam, Johnson delivered a speech announcing its resumption, but he emphasized that the U.S. attacks “struck the lines of supply which support continuing movement of men and arms against the people and government of South Vietnam. Our air strikes on North Vietnam from the beginning have been aimed at military targets and have been controlled with the greatest of care.” In response to Pope Paul VI’s appeal for an end to hostilities in Vietnam, he also called for a U.S.-drafted United Nations peace resolution. It’s hard to imagine Trump responding as graciously to the American-born Pope Leo XIV’s Easter declaration: “Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have power to unleash wars choose peace.”
America’s conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran would have given Jimmy Carter plenty of reason for angry public outbursts. Despite his naval career, he was not known for public cursing. After revolutionary militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, Carter tried every possible diplomatic effort to free the 66 hostages, believing that aggressive talk or acts would endanger their lives. Five months later, his military effort to rescue them failed, but he succeeded in negotiating their release at the moment Ronald Reagan took the oath of office on January 20, 1981.
Every president since Carter has been entangled in the Middle East. Reagan’s informal remarks after a suicide bomber killed 241 U.S. Marines in their Beirut barracks, on October 23, 1983, gave expression to his controlled “outrage” at such a “despicable act,” illustrative of “the bestial nature of those who would assume power if they could have their way.” At a memorial ceremony for the Marines, Reagan promised justice, demanded peace, and insisted that “America seeks no new territory, nor do we wish to dominate others.”
After the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush’s Oval Office address to a terrified nation borrowed Reagan’s term, despicable, to describe the use of civilian aircraft as missiles to kill more than 3,000 people. A born-again Christian, Bush also classified the act of terrorism as “evil” and declared that the nation’s “quiet, unyielding anger” would forge the “steel of American resolve.” Yet in a Trumpian preview, he learned from his May 2003 “Mission Accomplished” performance, about what would become an endless war of choice in Iraq, that boasting can be counterproductive.
[Charlie Warzel: The gleeful cruelty of the White House X account]
If only he had learned the lessons of his father, President George H. W. Bush, and his approach to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. A simple statement—“This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait”—summarized the World War II combat veteran’s restrained diplomacy. In his speech to Congress at the successful end of the Gulf War, only a few months after it commenced, Bush’s voice broke with emotion not as he boasted about his leadership prowess but when he saluted the U.S. and its victorious soldiers:
I’m sure that many of you saw on the television the unforgettable scene of four terrified Iraqi soldiers surrendering. They emerged from their bunker broken, tears streaming from their eyes, fearing the worst. And then there was an American soldier. Remember what he said? He said: “It’s okay. You’re all right now. You’re all right now.” That scene says a lot about America, a lot about who we are. Americans are a caring people. We are a good people, a generous people. Let us always be caring and good and generous in all we do.
It is a message the current president seems not to have absorbed.