According to Donald Trump, Iran and Israel “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”.
Waking up to find the ceasefire he had brokered had been violated, the US president told reporters outside the White House: “Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I’ve never seen before, the biggest load that we’ve seen.”
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
Asked about Trump’s comments on Wednesday, the Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said, “I think that he stated his views pretty abruptly and I think they were very clear.”
The furious expletive reflected “the gravity, the enormity of the situation in the Middle East”, the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said earlier in the day.
Trump is not the first leader to drop the f-word in a high-profile situation. Here are similarly startling instances.
‘Rat-fucking’
Amid all-night climate talks with world leaders in Copenhagen in 2009, former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd used the phrase “rat-fucking” to describe China’s stone-walling on a deal.
Rudd was exhausted and exasperated when he began his rant against the Chinese government, political commentator David Marr wrote in his Quarterly Essay on Rudd.
“His anger was real, but his language seemed forced, deliberately foul,” Marr wrote.
“In this mood, he’d been talking about countries ‘rat-fucking’ each other for days. Was a deal still possible, asked one of the Australians. ‘Depends whether those rat-fucking Chinese want to fuck us’.”
(Rudd said this in a briefing off the record, but it was reported anyway. It was not his only brush with having his swearing leaked.)
‘Fuck the colony!’
As King Charles finished addressing Australian parliament during his visit in 2024, he was met by a protest from independent senator Lidia Thorpe, who approached the stage yelling, “This is not your country”.
“You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” Thorpe, a Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung woman said.
“You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty.”
As security officers escorted Thorpe out, she shouted: “This is not your land. You are not my king. You are not our king.” And as she was forced back into the foyer, she could be heard shouting: “Fuck the colony!”
‘I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall’
Former Mexican president Vicente Fox gave an uncompromising response to Trump’s plans as Republican presidential frontrunner to make Mexico pay for a wall sealing off the country along the US border.
“I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall. He should pay for it. He’s got the money,” Fox told Jorge Ramos on Fusion in 2016.
Fox was asked if he was “afraid that he’s going to be the next president of the United States?”, and what that would mean for Mexico.
His response: “No, no, no, – democracy can not take that.”
‘This is a big fucking deal’
After introducing Barack Obama at the signing ceremony for a healthcare reform legislation at the White House in 2010, then-vice-president Joe Biden turned, hugged the then-US president, and excitedly whispered: “This is a big fucking deal!”
But he was loud enough to be picked up by microphones, and Fox News repeatedly ran the clip, adding to the lore of Biden’s loose lips.
‘The most unparliamentary of language’
Paul Gogarty, an Irish Greens member of parliament, had to apologise for using “unparliamentary language” against a Labour counterpart in a heated exchange over plans to cut social welfare payments.
“I respected your sincerity, I ask that you respect mine,” Gogarty said, before shouting: “With all due respect and in the most unparliamentary of language, fuck you Deputy Stagg. Fuck you!”
Gogarty then immediately apologised: “I now withdraw and apologise for it, but in outrage, that someone dares to question my sincerity on this issue.”
‘We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker’
In another Trump-related moment, representative Rashida Tlaib literally swore to impeach the US president just hours after she was sworn in as one of the first two Muslim women in Congress.
“We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker,” she said at a 2019 event hosted by the liberal group MoveOn. It drew applause from the room, but also sparked political pushback from Tlaib’s Democratic colleagues in the House.
