Not long after former President Donald J. Trump held a news conference on Monday about his civil fraud case, a Biden campaign social media account shared a clip accusing him of agreeing to take a foreign government’s money to pay a $175 million bond.
As is often the case in political campaigns, Trump’s team accused his opponents of depriving their candidate of nuance and context.
What was less typical was the language they used.
“Wrong you idiot,” a Trump campaign social media account, Trump War Room, responded to X. “He said he would pay with cash, securities or bonds.”
The Trump War Room account, part of his campaign’s rapid response efforts on social media, often posts excerpts from Mr. Trump’s speeches or remarks from campaign officials. Criticism of President Biden and the media is also common. And during the primaries, she attacked Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals with sharp words.
Campaign mudslinging is a political tradition as old as politics itself. But the use of expletives by one official campaign mouthpiece to address another reflects a coarsening of political discourse that has come with Mr. Trump’s rise and marked the 2024 presidential election campaign.
At recent rallies, Mr. Trump has used similar expletives to criticize Mr. Biden and a number of Democrats. Earlier this month, Trump told his supporters in Georgia that everything Mr. Biden touched turned into bull feces, using a slur that he admitted some would consider exaggerated.
“I tried to find another word, but there are some words that cannot be duplicated,” Mr. Trump said to the delight of the crowd. During the speech, Mr. Trump repeated that particular word or used a variant of it at least four times.
Mr. Trump revels in a combative style of politics that often relies on inflammatory language. His campaign aides have mirrored his rhetoric, issuing statements that personally target Mr. Trump’s opponents or refer to them with derisive epithets.
As Mr. Biden runs for re-election, his campaign has displayed an aggressive stance, particularly on social media, where campaign reports have attacked Mr. Trump over his comments and behavior. On Monday, the Biden campaign responded to the Trump campaign’s profanity with a mocking meme.
Along the way, both candidates also exchange comments on one another, often criticizing each other’s suitability for the presidency.
But although Mr. Biden has occasionally made headlines for speaking somewhat salty, Mr. Trump has made public vulgarities far more frequently since his first campaign began in 2015.
Mr. Trump, who often prides himself on breaking norms and making the political establishment pick his pearls, has continued to do so by criticizing his political opponents and the four criminal cases he faces , rejects.
At rallies, Mr. Trump often describes the 91 felony charges against him as “bullshit.” Then his crowd begins to chant the word together.
Monday’s social media exchange came after a hearing in Mr. Trump’s case in Manhattan involving allegations related to hush-money payments to a porn star. The same day, an appeals court reduced a bond that Mr. Trump must secure as he appeals a nearly half-billion-dollar verdict in the civil fraud case.
Mr. Trump had said he would back the bond with “cash or a bond or collateral or whatever is necessary” before being asked at a news conference whether he would accept money from a foreign government to back the bond pay.
Mr. Trump, who as president neither relinquished control of his global business nor abandoned foreign operations, has repeatedly accused Mr. Biden of taking millions of dollars from abroad, although no evidence has emerged to support that accusation.
On Monday, Mr. Trump said he did not expect to use foreign money to pay the bond, but added that he believed nothing could prevent it.
“No, I’m not doing that,” Mr. Trump said. “I think you might be allowed to do that. I don’t know. I mean, if you borrow money from a big bank, a lot of the banks are outside of our country – as you know, the biggest banks, frankly, are outside of our country. So you could do that. But I don’t need to borrow money.”
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2024-03-25 22:56:53
www.nytimes.com
