“When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is: ‘When they go low, we go high.‘”
– Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2016
“Shut up you ugly fuck.“
– The Democratic party’s official Twitter handle, replying to Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy, on May 27, 2026.
The most disturbing thing about that Democratic response to Stephen Miller is how unshocking it is. We’ve become inured to foul language, even from our political leaders and their social media channels. In our post-literate society, as words lose their power, swearing has become an idle form of punctuation. Donald Trump used to do most of his swearing in private. Now he curses in many of his speeches, press conferences and social media statements. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” he told Iran the other day.
Decency should not just be some quaint relic of the pre-digital age, something that only “pearl-clutchers” care about
According to a Washington Post analysis, Trump has used “vulgar language” in 93 percent of his speeches in his second term, which is roughly triple the amount of obscenity he deployed in the first. His political opponents used to clutch their pearls in disgust at his uncouthness: now they fight insult with more gratuitous insult. Miller’s tweet was itself a rude response: he had replied to a picture of the candidate James Talarico with the caption: “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.”
Nobody likes a prude, but we should admit that this is all extremely puerile and distasteful. Miller’s wife, Katie, the podcaster, went on Fox News to suggest that the reply to her husband was tantamount to “the same violent political rhetoric that is leading people to shooting up, whether it be the White House Correspondents’ Dinner or President Trump in Butler.” She also, as our Cockburn has noted, went on to social media herself to post a picture of Paulina Mangubat, who apparently runs the guilty @TheDemocrats Twitter account. “This is what a sad, unhappy, female Liberal looks like,” she wrote, acidly.
It’s understandable, even admirable that a woman should wish to defend her man. But Mrs. Miller might want to take the beam out of her own Twitter account before she grandstands about unpleasant internet rhetoric. She recently replied to a Telegraph article entitled “The far-right has got a new weapon: glamorous young women” by posting a picture of the author, Leaf Arbuthnot, and the words: “The author of this article… ” Though not as blunt as the Democratic dig yesterday at Mr. Miller, Katie’s intention was clearly to suggest that Leaf was insufficiently attractive to be writing such a piece. The post was viewed 1.15 million times, and poor Leaf received all sorts of horrid abuse as a result.
These are, however, the putrid online waters in which we all now must swim. The White House Communications Director, Steven Cheung, is perhaps the most potty-mouthed tweeter in Trump’s orbit. Just this month, he has called former US diplomat Brett Bruen a “slope-brained, mouth-breathing moron” and said that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “has no idea what the fuck he is talking about” and “should shut his stupid mouth.”
Such talk makes a certain type of man feel tough. And all these vicious messages perform well online – because nastiness engages people, if only negatively, and algorithms reward rudeness. Bad manners maketh memes. But decency should not just be some quaint relic of the pre-digital age, something that only “pearl-clutchers” care about. If you really want to save western civilization – and the Millers, Cheung and co. claim they do – you probably ought to remember that it was, in some ways, built on common courtesies. The Democrats, for their part, increasingly don’t care for western civilization, and don’t believe that “going high” worked anyway. And so we all sink, lower and lower, towards what’s sure to be a very ugly midterm election cycle.
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