Democrats race to embrace swearing and angry comebacks – but will it work?
Democrats want your attention, and they’re done asking politely.Several months into Donald Trump’s second term, presidential aspirants, members of Congress and party officials are abandoning carefully calibrated messaging in favor of gut-level rhetoric that is angrier, rawer and unapologetically more profane.“Things are really fucked up right now,” Democratic congressman Robert Garcia said in a TikTok video with the influencer known as the Regina George liberal, who has built a following demanding Democrats get meaner.With party approval ratings at decade-lows and their base increasingly alarmed by what they fear is America’s authoritarian slide, Democrats are racing to revamp how they talk – and how they resist.Democrats’ wider embrace of swearing, trolling and scorched-earth comebacks is part of a broader mission to sound more like “normal people” and less like a party of poll-tested talking points and white papers. From campaign rallies to TikTok vent seshes, the characteristically buttoned-up Democrats are taking more risks – and punching back harder at Trump and his administration.“This is not the Democratic party of your grandfather,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), declared earlier this year. “This is a new Democratic party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight.”There is widespread agreement among soul-searching Democrats that they have an authenticity problem.View image in fullscreen“We are tired of being seen as weak and out of touch, and are really trying to make the point that it’s some bullshit that the Republican party and all the big corporations that support them continue to try to frame us as [such],” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party and head of the DNC’s association of state Democratic parties.The party has hemorrhaged rural and working-class voters for years. But in 2024, Democrats also saw worrying drops in support among Black and Latino voters as well as young people – becoming a party increasingly confined to the coasts, major metros and college towns.After losing to Trump, again, fundraising has slumped and Democrats now lag far behind Republicans in voter registration. Since November, several leading Democrats, including California governor Gavin Newsom, have described the party’s brand as “toxic”.Democrats have many theories as to how it got so bad – but they keep circling back to the most basic political skill: communication.Critics say risk-averse party elders – valued more for their fundraising prowess than their digital fluency – failed to adapt to the tectonic shifts in media consumption. Democrats anodyne messaging, they argue, might have made the evening news, but it was too easily drowned out by the right’s online surround sound, turbocharged to amplify Trump and his Magaworld allies.“A message that nobody hears cannot persuade them,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, veteran Democratic strategist and communications researcher who has convened hundreds of focus groups with American voters. “If you keep producing blandly unobjectionable 100-word statements … then it truly does not matter what you are saying because literally no one’s gonna hear it.”The bigger challenge, Shenker-Osorio notes, is that Democrats aren’t just competing for eyeballs with Republicans — they’re up against an algorithm that prizes outrage and emotion, whether it’s Maga memes or Taylor and Travis engagement headlines.Months into Trump’s second term, buoyed by a string of off-cycle election wins and a revved up base, Democrats are experimenting more. More members of Congress are on TikTok and heeding advice to adopt platforms like Twitch and Snapchat. They’ve jumped on viral trends and livestreamed hot takes stepping off the chamber floor. They’re also venturing into less friendly terrain, yakking it up on “manosphere” podcasts or launching their own.Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary and a possible 2028 presidential contender, was an early evangelist of the go-everywhere style. He appeared on Fox News when many Democrats refused to sit down with Trump’s favorite network hosts. In April, he sat for a nearly three-hour interview on the podcast Flagrant, covering everything from White Lotus to “Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays”.View image in fullscreenThe push for a more free-wheeling style hasn’t slowed the circulation of polling memos and strategy briefs coaching Democrats on how to be more free-wheeling. There has been reams of guidance on what to say (Trump’s takeover of DC is a “distraction” from his market-rattling tariffs and Medicaid cuts, for example) and also what not to say (words like birthing person, BIPOC).Republicans have sneered at Democrats’ newfound brashness, deriding the effort as “desperate” and “Maga cosplay”. Comparatively, the White House’s social media strategy seems designed to shock. In a July post on X, its official account wrote: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.”Democrats accept that some attempts will be cringe. In February, an unfortunate turn-of-phrase at a rally alongside federal workers became a cautionary tale.“I don’t swear in public very well,” first-term congresswoman Maxine Dexter of Oregon warned before throwing caution to the wind and declaring: “We have to fuck Trump!”The crowd cheered. “You said it!” an audience member shouted encouragingly. But the remark was dragged online, with Politico observing that it “landed less like a diss and more like a proposition”.View image in fullscreenBut the stakes have grown far more serious.In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination this month, Trump’s White House has led a clampdown on political speech, threatening to punish left-leaning figures and groups it accuses of spreading hateful rhetoric.At a rally in North Carolina this week, vice president JD Vance, who once feared Trump could be “America’s Hitler,” urged Americans to abandon such rhetoric: “If you want stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi.”Elected Democrats were near-universal in their condemnation of political violence, which has targeted officials in both parties. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and other prominent Republicans from casting blame on the left. “I hate my opponent,” Trump said, speaking at Kirk’s memorial.In a widely circulated exchange, a reporter asked progressive Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren for her response to calls on Democrats to “lower the temperature”.“Oh, please,” Warren replied. “Why don’t you start with the president of the United States?”For years, Democrats took Michelle Obama’s “go high” mantra as gospel.In 2018, when Barack Obama’s former attorney general Eric Holder reinterpreted the refrain, suggesting that “when they go low, we kick them,” he was rebuked by Michelle Obama herself and also by Trump – despite his own long record of disparaging and even threatening language. Earlier that year, Trump asked lawmakers why the US should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa rather than from places like Norway.Seven years later, Trump is still heaving expletives and insults from the bully pulpit. But this time, Democrats are far less reticent to respond.“If we’re serious that Trump is a threat to the fundamental values of our country and a threat to democracy, then we have to use these tactics and be real fighters,” Kleeb said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYet, as Democrats fight to break through Trump’s unfiltered media dominance, there is deep frustration among their base that the party’s leadership is not doing enough to stop him – no matter how tough they talk. In Washington, out-of-power Democrats are under pressure to use the little leverage they have in a looming government shutdown showdown with Republicans.Meanwhile, some of the fiercest resistance is coming from the states. In August, Texas Democrats fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum needed to vote on a brazen, Trump-sought plan to redraw its political maps in the middle of the decade. Though Republicans ultimately approved a new map carved up in their favor, the Democrats’ quorum-breaking gambit helped trigger a response from governors like Newsom in California, whose Trump 2.0-era mantra now is: “fight fire with fire.”In recent months, Newsom has matched his combative posture with a pugnacious social media persona, a mimicry of Trump’s all-caps bombast. The governor’s team now regularly trolls the president, posting with a cadence that mirrors the right-wing outrage machine they mock, blasting out lengthy rants, AI-generated taunts, even the occasional Spanish-language vulgarity.“I’m sick of being weak,” Newsom said on a podcast in August, adding: “We’re going to punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.”View image in fullscreenIn a full-circle moment, Holder, a longtime champion of clean maps, threw his support behind California’sretaliatory gerrymander.Lorena Gonzalez, the salty-tongued leader of the influential California Labor Federation, said the appetite for a no-holds-barred approach is strong.“People are frustrated. We’re frustrated,” she said. “So we’re fighting back – and the language, I think, mirrors the frustration and the urgency.”At a rally launching California’s redistricting campaign, Gonzalez rendered a blunt verdict on Trump’s presidency: “We tell our members who believed him, it’s okay. He fucking lied.” The crowd roared, and she repeated the bit. Handing the mic to the next speaker, Gonzalez grinned: “I’ve exceeded my number of fucks today.”More and more Democrats argue that the real divide in their party isn’t between the ideological left and center, but between the fighters and the so-called “folders”. And the so-called fighters tend to be the angriest.Among the most prolific Democratic swearers were Representatives Eric Swalwell of California, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Jasmine Crockett or Texas, all younger progressives, according to a Washington Post analysis of social media posts, podcasts and other public statements by politicians. Among party officials, Kleeb topped the list. Overall, it found that Democrats cursed far more frequently than Republicans in the months following Trump’s return to the White House.“I do cuss but I’m just passionate,” Crockett said in an interview last month. “I don’t imagine myself saying, ‘Trump is trying to be a dictator,’ and then sitting quietly. No. If I say it, I mean it.”A former trial attorney, Crockett said language can help build trust. “I never had the benefit of putting on a facade,” she said. “You’ve got to build a rapport quickly, and the best way to do that is to be authentically who you are.”View image in fullscreenResearch suggests that swearing can make a speaker seem more honest and sincere –though voters are quick to detect a false note.“Swearing as a tactic is dumb,” said Lis Smith, a veteran Democratic strategist known for her bluntness. Her advice: “Just be normal. Don’t use weird lefty academic jargon. Don’t dismiss people’s real concerns about things like crime by citing stats and data. And don’t think that the key to coming across as authentic is dropping four letter words that you don’t use normally.”As younger Democrats rise through the ranks, an “extremely online” vernacular has crept into the party’s messaging – snarky, irreverent and tailor-made to go viral.Earlier this year, Garcia brought a poster of Elon Musk to a Congressional hearing in a stunt he called a “dick pic”. In June, House Democrats elected Garcia to serve as ranking member on the influential House oversight committee – the first time in 100 years a second-term congressman was elevated to the role.The DNC has also sharpened its trolling game, with edgy posts, including one suggesting the Secretary of Defense was “tweeting while drunk” and another taunting White House aide Stephen Miller with a crude “cuck-chair” meme. They’ve also seized on right-wing anger over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case, breathlessly boosting calls for Republicans to “release the files”.View image in fullscreenAt the party’s summer meeting, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the former vice-presidential nominee with a “Midwest nice” reputation, took a juvenile jab at Trump’s chronic venous insufficiency, mocking his “fat ankles”.“Petty as hell,” Walz admitted, as the room erupted in cheers.Yet for those who fear authoritarian drift, trolls and clap backs can seem woefully insufficient in the face of Trump’s mass deportation campaign or his deployment of federal troops to American cities.Ridicule, Shenker-Osorio argues, can be a powerful tactic, but only as part of a broader resistance. “Taking the piss out of the strongman is a really critical part of fighting authoritarianism,” she said.Still, she cautioned: “Rhetoric without action is nothing. If anything, it just makes voters more frustrated.”David Smith contributed to this story from Washington More
