President Donald Trump curses, and not only when the cameras are rolling. That, at least, is the assessment of the woman who spent her days explaining his words to the White House press corps: Karoline Leavitt, 29, the president’s former press secretary, who sat down with Fox News host Sean Hannity, 64, for an interview that aired on Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
The two had been working through the tenser moments of Trump’s diplomacy — his calls to Vladimir Putin and to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, conversations that have occasionally turned sharp over the past year and a half — when Hannity asked the blunt version of the question: “Does he curse?”
Leavitt did not hedge. “Yeah, he does,” she said. “He curses a lot, actually. Well, not particularly on those calls. Just, in general.”
The admission put on the record a side of the 80-year-old president that the public has mostly caught only in flashes. Leavitt went further, telling Hannity that Trump sounds much the same behind closed doors as he does in public.
Behind Closed Doors With Starmer
To illustrate the point, Leavitt reached for a lunch with then-British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, where, by her account, Trump laid into his host over U.K. immigration policy. She said the president told Starmer his policies were stupid, insisted he knew the country and its people, and told him they hated what he was doing. Starmer, Leavitt said, simply sat there.
That anecdote arrived without profanity attached, which fits a longer pattern. Trump has never needed a swear word to land an insult. He has described political adversaries — among them Rep. Thomas Massie and California Gov. Gavin Newsom — as “stupid,” “nutjobs,” “disasters,” “losers” and “low-IQ individuals,” all of it broadcastable.
A Habit on the Public Record
When he does reach for stronger material, it tends to leave a mark. In June 2025, with Israel and Iran both threatening a fragile ceasefire, Trump vented to reporters that the two countries had been fighting so long that they “don’t know what the f–k they’re doing.” A day later, pressed on the outburst, he defended himself, telling reporters that getting his way sometimes requires tough talk.
Nor has he reserved the vocabulary for matters of war and peace. At a Las Vegas rally during the 2024 campaign, he reached for an unprintable epithet to describe an immigration order signed by former President Joe Biden. Supporters in the hall took up the word and chanted it back at him — an exchange that captured, better than any aide’s account could, how little the profanity costs him with his own base.
Across both terms, the language has surfaced in front of reporters, at rallies and inside the White House itself. Leavitt supplied 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 stepped down as press secretary in August 2026 to spend more time with her family, ending a run in which she became a frequent and combative presence at the podium. The Hannity interview was a retrospective on that stint, and she used part of it to revisit her dealings with the reporters she had faced.
She also said some White House correspondents privately apologized to her for asking what she called “unfair” questions. The claim sat comfortably alongside her broader message: that the president her critics watch on television is the same man his staff sees in private.
The profanity answer, though, was the one that traveled. Press secretaries typically spend their tenure smoothing the edges off a principal’s language, recasting an off-color line as candor or as strength. Leavitt, no longer holding the job, chose the shorter route — and the verdict came not from an opponent or an anonymous aide, but from the person who had been paid to explain the president’s words for a living.