President Donald Trump swore live on air during a high-stakes meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House.
Trump was taking questions from reporters during Friday’s meeting and was asked about the conflict with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro when he dropped the expletive.
“He has offered everything,” Trump said, referring to Maduro. “You know why? Because he doesn’t want to f*** around with the United States.”
After using the swear word, Trump swiftly brought the press conference to a close.
Broadcasters apologized to viewers for the president’s language.
In June, Trump lashed out with the same language after a ceasefire deal between Israel and Iran he announced earlier appeared to break down.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing,” a frustrated Trump told reporters at the White House as he departed for a NATO summit in the Netherlands.
Trump’s language became more expletive in his third presidential campaign, according to analysis by The New York Times. In 2024, Trump cursed in public more than 1,700 times, according to the newspaper.
In 2016, Trump told his supporters, “We’re gonna have businesses that used to be in New Hampshire that are now in Mexico. Come back to New Hampshire, and you can tell them to go f*** themselves.”
Friday’s outburst was prompted by a question about what more Venezuela’s Maduro “could do” to ease tensions with the U.S. after the Trump administration escalated the military campaign against the leader’s regime this week.
Trump claimed Wednesday that he “authorized” CIA operations on Venezuela’s soil because Venezuela “emptied their prisons into the United States of America” and flooded the country with drugs.
Last month, the administration declared the U.S. is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president has labeled “unlawful combatants,” according to a confidential notice to members of Congress.
The notice appears to invoke extraordinary wartime powers to justify a series of missile strikes targeting boats off the coast of Venezuela and in the Caribbean that have killed at least 27 people in recent weeks.
