Twelve minutes into a health forum discussion for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander organizations, Kamala Harris on Monday offered a punchy piece of advice to younger members of the audience.
“We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open,” the US vice-president said. “Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that fucking door down.”
Harris, who is out front for the Biden-Harris re-election campaign on women’s and reproductive rights, made the remarks at a leadership summit at which she also described how her parents had met at a civil rights march.
Harris’s remark came as she was describing the importance of breaking down barriers and being the first to do it.
“Here’s the thing about breaking down barriers. It does not mean that you start on one side of the barrier and end up on another,” she said. “There’s breaking involved. And when you break things you get cut and you may bleed. And it is worth it every time.”
But while presidents and vice-presidents do not customarily use profanity, it is becoming more common, though often in private or leaked conversations. Joe Biden recently referred to rival Donald Trump as “a sick fuck”, and to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as a “bad fucking guy” and an “asshole.”
Harry Truman once explained his firing of the insubordinate but popular Gen Douglas MacArthur by saying, “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals.”
Lyndon Johnson swore so much that it would be impossible to document all of it, according to a recent essay by the historian Tevi Troy in the City Journal, including the lament: “I don’t know what the fuck to do about Vietnam.”
According to the survey, US presidential cursing is common when referring to Netanyahu. In 1996, Bill Clinton once fumed, “Who’s the fucking leader of the free world?” Trump said “fuck him”, after Netanyahu acknowledged Biden’s election victory in 2020.
But few of those were meant as calls to action, leaving Harris, as she said in her discussion, “breaking down barriers”.
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