The man who ran the country swears, and he does it off camera too. That verdict comes from Karoline Leavitt, 29, the president’s former press secretary, who told Fox News host Sean Hannity, 64, in an interview that aired on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that President Donald Trump’s private vocabulary is a good deal saltier than most Americans realize.
The question came up as the two were picking through the tenser stretches of Trump’s diplomacy — his calls to Vladimir Putin and to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, exchanges that have occasionally turned sharp over the past year and a half. Hannity put it plainly: “Does he curse?”
There was no hedging in the reply. “Yeah, he does,” she said. “He curses a lot, actually. Well, not particularly on those calls. Just, in general.”
Voters have caught that side of the 80-year-old president only in flashes, and Leavitt’s answer put it on the record. She pushed the point further with Hannity, saying Trump sounds much the same behind closed doors as he does at a microphone.
Behind Closed Doors With Starmer
Her example was a lunch with then-British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Trump, by her account, went after his host over U.K. immigration policy — telling Starmer the policies were stupid, insisting he knew the country and its people, and telling him they hated what he was doing. Starmer, Leavitt said, simply sat there.
No profanity was attached to that story, which tracks with a longer pattern: Trump has never needed a swear word to land an insult. Political adversaries including Rep. Thomas Massie and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have been labeled “stupid,” “nutjobs,” “disasters,” “losers” and “low-IQ individuals” — every bit of it broadcastable.
A Habit on the Public Record
The stronger material, when he reaches for it, tends to leave a mark. In June 2025, as Israel and Iran both threatened a fragile ceasefire, he vented to reporters that the two countries had been fighting so long that they “don’t know what the f*** they’re doing.” Pressed on the outburst a day later, he defended himself, telling reporters that getting his way sometimes requires tough talk.
War and peace hardly have a monopoly on the vocabulary, either. At a Las Vegas rally during the 2024 campaign, he used an unprintable epithet to describe an immigration order signed by former President Joe Biden. The crowd picked the word up and chanted it back — a moment that showed, more clearly than any aide’s account could, how little the profanity costs him with his own base.
The language has turned up in front of reporters, at rallies and inside the White House itself across both terms. What Leavitt added was the view from the other side of the podium: the same register, she indicated, when there is no camera in the room at all.
Life After the Briefing Room
Leavitt left the job in August 2026, saying she wanted more time with her family and closing out a tenure in which she became a frequent and combative presence at the podium. The Hannity interview looked back on that stint, and she spent part of it revisiting her dealings with the reporters she used to face.
Hannity asked why she had the “freedom” to slam journalists to their faces that press secretaries under other presidents did not. “Well, in a way, I’m sort of emulating what he does, right? It’s sort of his language. I’m just speaking it,” she answered. She called Trump a “great boss” and described him as “very uplifting to the people who work for him, very complimentary and very fun,” and said he watched her briefings whenever he could and “appreciated those moments very much.”
Some White House correspondents, she also said, privately apologized to her for asking what she called “unfair” questions. The claim fit her wider argument — that the president his critics watch on television is the man his staff deals with in private.
In the same interview cycle, in comments reported September 24, 2026, Leavitt described Trump as a “caged lion” who was furious rather than frightened after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, asking “Why Can’t I Go?” before the people around him said no.
The sit-down was an appearance on Hannity’s “Hang Out” podcast, and Leavitt used another stretch of it to defend Trump’s treatment of women. “In fact, sometimes I think he might listen to women a little bit more than men and I think that he just has such respect,” she said, pointing to his appointments of Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff, Kellyanne Conway as senior counsel and Sarah Huckabee Sanders as press secretary.
Still, it was the profanity answer that traveled. A press secretary’s standing task is to sand down the boss’s language, repackaging an off-color line as candor or as strength. Out of the job, Leavitt took the shorter route — and the assessment came not from a political opponent or an anonymous aide, but from the person who had been paid to explain the president’s words for a living.
