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 being open to taking a foreign government’s money to pay for a $175 million bond.
As is often typical during political campaigns, Mr. Trump’s team accused their opponents of stripping nuance and context from their candidate’s remarks.
What was less typical was the language they used.
“Wrong, you dipshit,” a Trump campaign social media account, Trump War Room, fired back on X. “He said he’ll pay with cash, securities, or bonds.”
The Trump War Room account, part of his campaign’s rapid response efforts on social media, often posts clips from Mr. Trump’s speeches or from remarks by campaign surrogates. It also frequently shares criticisms of President Biden and the media. And during the primary, it attacked Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals in harsh terms.
Campaign mudslinging is a political tradition as old as politics itself. But the use of an expletive by one official campaign mouthpiece to address another reflects a coarsening of political discourse that has accompanied Mr. Trump’s rise and that has characterized the 2024 presidential campaign.
At recent rallies, Mr. Trump has used similar profanity to criticize Mr. Biden and a number of Democrats. Earlier this month in Georgia, Mr. Trump told supporters that everything Mr. Biden touched turned into bull droppings, using an expletive that he acknowledged some might consider beyond the pale.
“I tried finding a different word, but there are some words that cannot be duplicated,” Mr. Trump said, to the glee of the crowd. During the speech, Mr. Trump would repeat that particular word, or use a variant of it, at least four times.
Mr. Trump revels in a combative style of politics, one that often relies on incendiary language. His campaign aides mirror his rhetoric, issuing statements that take personal shots at Mr. Trump’s opponents or use jeering epithets to refer to them.
As Mr. Biden runs for re-election, his campaign has shown an aggressive bent, particularly on social media, where campaign accounts attack Mr. Trump over his comments and his demeanor. On Monday, the Biden campaign responded to the Trump campaign’s profanity with a mocking meme.
On the trail, both candidates also trade jabs about the other, frequently criticizing their fitness for the presidency.
Mr. Biden has on occasion grabbed headlines for a bit of salty language and has directed schoolyard taunts at Mr. Trump. In 2016, after the release of the “Access Hollywood” video in which Mr. Trump boasted about groping women, Mr. Biden, then vice president, said he wanted to “take him behind the gym.” Two years later, he said that if he were in high school, Mr. Biden would take Mr. Trump “behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”
But overall Mr. Trump has publicly deployed vulgarities with significantly higher frequency since launching his first campaign in 2015. And he has continued to do so this year as he criticizes his political opponents and dismisses the four criminal cases he is facing.
During rallies, Mr. Trump often refers to the 91 felony charges against him as “bullshit.” His crowds then start chanting the word in unison.
Monday’s social media exchange came after a hearing in Mr. Trump’s case in Manhattan, on charges related to hush money paid to a porn star. On the same day, an appeals court reduced a bond that Mr. Trump must secure as he appeals a nearly half-billion-dollar judgment in the civil fraud case.
Mr. Trump had said that he would secure the bond with “cash or bond or security or whatever is necessary” before he was asked at a news conference if he would accept money from a foreign government to pay the bond.
Mr. Trump, who did not cede control of his global business or give up foreign business while president, has repeatedly accused Mr. Biden of taking millions of dollars from foreign countries, though evidence has not surfaced to support that accusation.
On Monday, Mr. Trump said he did not foresee taking foreign money to pay the bond, but he added that he did not think anything would prevent it.
“No, I don’t do that,” Mr. Trump said. “I think you’d be allowed to, possibly. I don’t know. I mean, if you go borrow from a big bank, many of the banks are outside — 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.”
