“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards”

Remember when vulgarity in American politics still seemed almost surprising? When it was considered noteworthy that Donald Trump swears a lot? When he forced The New York Times to be less tight-ass about censoring swears? When he made headlines around the world by calling certain countries “shitholes”? Well, those days are fucking gone forever.

Or nearly. Because there’s always some new shit. Trump saying swearwords? Yawn. Trump saying swearwords on his social media account? Meh. Trump saying swearwords on his social media account on Easter Sunday in the course of threatening war crimes? Hmmm. And doing so with… suspiciously scrupulous spelling and punctuation (if not capitalization)? Oh, come the fuck on.

And yet here we are. On Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, Donald Trump’s Truth Social account posted the following:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

There are a few things worth noting here. The first is, of course, that the president of the United States of America is crudely, rudely, publicly threatening war crimes – and, yes, on Easter Sunday. This is, shall we say, a little out of keeping with the presidential standards, as Barbara A. Perry pointed out in The Atlantic. It’s not that previous presidents never swore; it’s that they generally didn’t do so in public. There was a tone that was expected of America’s leaders in time of danger and strife, and even George W. Bush knew it; after 9/11 he said,

I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

Just imagine what Donald Trump would say in similar circumstances.

I was going to say we don’t have to imagine, but, ah, about that. Does that Truth Social post (they call them “truths” but I think “sharts” would be a better word) really sound like Donald Trump? Not everyone thinks so. Andy Borowitz, for example, pointed out that, among other things, Trump has a history of misspelling “strait” as “straight.”

Beyond that, though, what’s with this almost twee folksiness in writing “Fuckin’” with the apostrophe? If you’re in earnest, even if you say “fuckin,” you write “fucking.” Picture yourself texting someone who has locked you out: “Open the fucking door, you asshole.” Not “Open the fuckin’ door, you crazy bastard.” It’s just too… finger-lickin’ good. Jocular, even.

It reminds me of Will Ferguson’s 2002 novel Happiness, about a rambling self-help book that ends up almost destroying the world by making people too well adjusted and insouciant. Among other things, it encourages people to abandon their jobs; as Ferguson’s protagonist, an editor named Edwin de Valu, explains to a co-worker,

“At one point, he tells us that it’s okay to take a break from our past, to hang up a sign and say to the world, ‘Gone fishin’.’”

“Gone fishin’?”

“That’s right: Gone fishin’. Can you imagine anything so trite?”

It really is rather… studied. 

It’s not as though no one says “fuckin’”; when speaking in casual earnest, that’s the normal pronunciation, as exemplified by an interaction between de Valu and the (cynical, as it turns out) author of the self-help book near the end of Happiness:

“I don’t edit UFO books,” said Edwin, testily. “I edit self-help.”

“Same fuckin’ thing.”

“Open the Fuckin’ Strait” is something a standard-issue vulgarian might say, but in writing you would expect either “Fucking” or “Fuckin” (no apostrophe) or maybe “Fucken.” To spell it with the apostrophe is a thing novelists do.

Speaking of which. Here’s another quote from Happiness:

“The crazy bastard’s going to kill us!” yelled Mr. Mead as he scurried, head down, into the front passenger seat.

“Crazy bastard” is an established collocation, of course. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, you can find 137 results for “crazy bastard” in the singular, and 19 results for “crazy bastards” in the plural. And the results are nearly all from novels, short stories, TV series, and movies, often science fiction, fantasy, or action. It comes in a few tones:

• Grudging approbation, like “You’re a crazy bastard, you know that?” from an episode of Roswell, or like “HFPA, you crazy bastards, you” from the blog The Edge of the Frame
• Panicked interaction with a familiar person or persons, like “Argh! hold your fire, you crazy bastard!” from Firestorm
• Stressful response to an action of a specific third party, like “He just flipped out. The crazy bastard. He didn’t even care about the money. He just wanted to kill her” from an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street
• Annoyance at irrational actors outside of one’s control, like “Some crazy bastards pissed off Zeus and he’s on the warpath!” from Turbo Kid

The closest to the usage in Trump’s post is from a comment on an article by Michael Rowe on the “Ground Zero mosque” in the Huffington Post (the comments are no longer visible on the huffpost site, but COCA has preserved it):

Islam didn’t kill those people; some crazy bastards in a plane did.

One thing that shows throughout is a sense of lack of control on the part of the speaker – the person(s) described is either familiar to the speaker, and someone whom the speaker cannot command (at least not always), or not familiar but also not within the speaker’s control, and the speaker feels this clearly.

Another thing it shows is, again, a style more characteristic of a professional writer. Not inevitably, to be sure. But “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell” – well, it’s just my impression, but that reads like the voice of someone who is making wild threats in the knowledge they have lost control of the situation, or, more to the point, the voice of a writer presenting the voice of someone making wild threats (if the writer isn’t all that good, it may not intend loss of control, but it still has the air of it).

And then there are those capital letters. Well, of course, they’re all over the place, and that’s Trump’s style, to be sure – as well as the style of anyone trying to imitate him – as well as the styles of countless other people. Capital letters tend to confuse the hell out of a lot of people. Or the Hell, for those who specifically always think of Hell as a real place (like Heaven). That doesn’t tell us that the writer, whoever it is, is an evangelical Christian, but it’s not inconsistent with it. Frankly, it’s almost more noteworthy that “crazy bastards” isn’t capitalized. A forensic linguist might find these useful clues as to the real authorship of this post – if they had the time and energy and fucks to give.

One more thing. Readers of this site may know of my penchant for looking at translations in news sources in various languages of vulgar pronouncements (by Anthony Scaramucci or Donald Trump or Dana Bash or Emmanuel Macron or Pope Francis). This has become nearly impossible lately – newspapers around the world paywall most of their articles (and I can’t afford to subscribe to two dozen newspapers just to check articles very sporadically), and if you’re not a subscriber even the free articles are often nearly impossible to read because of all the pop-up ads and videos, which overtax both my patience and my computer’s processor. But, for the curious, here are examples I’ve managed to get of renditions in French, German, Italian, and Spanish:

• « Ouvrez le Putain de Détroit, espèce de tarés, ou vous vivrez en Enfer – VOUS ALLEZ VOIR ! », a écrit le président américain sur sa plateforme Truth social, ajoutant : « Gloire à Allah. » —LeMonde.fr
• “Öffnet die verdammte Meerenge, ihr verrückten Mistkerle”, schrieb Trump. —Zeit.de
• “Martedì in Iran sarà la Giornata della centrale elettrica e la giornata del ponte, tutto in uno. Non ci sarà niente di simile!!! Aprite il maledetto Stretto, pazzi bastardi, o vivrete all’inferno – Vedrete! Sia lode ad Allah”. Lo scrive su Truth il presidente americano, Donald Trump. —Today.it
• En una publicación llena de palabras altisonantes, Trump dijo: “Abran el maldito estrecho, bastardos locos, o vivirán en el infierno. ¡Ya lo verán! Alabado sea Alá”. —ElUniversal.com.mx

Here’s a quick run-down of those translations:

the Fuckin’ Strait:

• French: le Putain de Détroit
• German: die verdammte Meerenge
• Italian: il maledetto Stretto
• Spanish: el maldito estrecho

The French translation is the obvious winner here: literally “the Whore of Strait” (idiomatically “the Fucking Strait”) – all the others just mean “the damned strait.”

you crazy bastards:

• French: espèce de tarés
• German: verrückten Mistkerle
• Italian: pazzi bastardi
• Spanish: bastardos locos

Again, while the other three literally mean “crazy bastards” (with the same implications as in English), the French uses “tarés,” which more literally means “defective ones” and more figuratively “madmen,” and doesn’t avail itself of a term of abuse relating to parentage; the phrase “espèce de” (“species of”) is found in various derogatory phrases, such as “espèce de con,” which literally means “species of cunt” but figuratively means “fucken jerk” or “you idiot.”

And how, by the way, is it being represented in English news sources? The Testy Copy Editors group on Facebook posted a collection of screenshots from The New York Times, The Guardian, the New York Post, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN via The Daily Beast, showing between them a clear hierarchy of vulgarity, with fuck above bastards above hell:

Thanks to Nancy Friedman and Ben Zimmer for some of the links.

#crazyBastards #DonaldTrump #Fuckin #hell #Iran