The Guardian reports that the current president has made a practice of using profane language in public — not as a rare slip, but as a settled habit. I am told this has become something of a studied posture, a signal of authenticity to some portion of the citizenry. I do not doubt the political calculation behind it. But I would counsel the Republic to think carefully about what is being calculated away.

The office of the presidency is not merely a position of power. It is a performance of the Republic's character before its own citizens and before every foreign power watching. When I speak of 'performance,' I do not mean theater or pretense — I mean the visible conduct by which a nation tells the world, and tells itself, what it values. Language is not decorative. It is the medium through which authority either commands respect or squanders it.

I have read arguments — and I infer they are made today in the president's defense — that plain, unvarnished speech is the language of the people, and that ceremony is the affectation of aristocrats. I find this argument ingenious and wrong. The dignity I tried to attach to the executive office was not borrowed from monarchy; it was constructed precisely to give the Republic something monarchies gave by birth: a visible embodiment of civic seriousness. That dignity belongs to the office, not to any one holder of it. To spend it down through deliberate coarseness is to leave less of it for those who follow.

There is a further matter worth naming. The Guardian notes that this behavior 'redefines norms.' Norms, once redefined, are very difficult to restore. I know something of precedent-setting; I was conscious with almost every act I took as president that I was writing an instruction manual for those who would come after. A president who normalizes contempt for the dignity of the office does not simply offure it himself — he makes it easier for every successor to go further still. That is how institutions erode: not in a single catastrophic moment, but in the accumulation of small permissions.

I will not render a verdict on the man. Verdicts belong to the citizenry and, in due season, to history. But I will offer this counsel: the Republic should ask itself not whether a given style of speech feels refreshing in the moment, but whether it strengthens or weakens the habits of public conduct that self-government requires over generations. The answer to that question, I submit, is not difficult — and it does not depend on which faction one belongs to.