We used to expect our Presidents to be role models. We encouraged our children to emulate them. We hoped that our children would learn from their example of service, valor, and dedication to principle. Sometimes we airbrushed their flaws or mythologized them. But we expected them to act and speak with dignity, as befits the Office.

But not Donald Trump. He has made a mockery of the Presidency. Imagine Abe Lincoln or Harry Truman or Dwight D. Eisenhower hawking tennis shoes or watches for his personal profit in the middle of his campaign.

Worse, however, is his crude language. He has brought locker-room talk onto the public stage, which no other American President has ever done. It is literally impossible to imagine any previous President talking in public with admiration about the size of Arnold Palmer’s genitals. Trump and his campaign hit a new low at the infamous event at Madison Square Garden.

The New York Times noticed:

Four-letter words were flying everywhere. One speaker flipped his middle finger at the opposition. Another made what was interpreted as an oral sex joke regarding Vice President Kamala Harris. Another suggested she was a prostitute. Still another discussed the supposed sexual habits of Latinos rather explicitly.

All in all, former President Donald J. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday was a cornucopia of crudeness, punctuated by the kind of language that once would have been unthinkable for a gathering held to promote the candidacy of a would-be president of the United States. But among the many lines that Mr. Trump has obliterated in his time in politics is the invisible boundary between propriety and profanity.

Mr. Trump has always been more prone than any of his predecessors in the White House to publicly use what were once called dirty words. But in his third campaign for the presidency, his speeches have grown coarser and coarser. Altogether, according to a computer search, Mr. Trump has used words that would have once gotten a kid’s mouth washed out with soap at least 140 times in public this year. Counting tamer four-letter words like “damn” and “hell,” he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times in 2024

What minimal self-restraint Mr. Trump once showed in his public discourse has evaporated. A recent New York Times analysis of his public comments this year showed that he uses such language 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran for president in 2016. He sometimes acknowledges that he knows he should not but quickly adds that he cannot help himself.

He often relates that Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader and son of the Rev. Billy Graham, has chided the former president about his language. “I wrote him back,” Mr. Trump said at a rally this month where he discussed the golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis size and invited the crowd to shout out a four-letter word to describe Ms. Harris. “I said, I’m going to try to do that, but actually, the stories won’t be as good. Because you can’t put the same emphasis on it. So tonight, I broke my rule.”

The crowd typically does not mind; quite the opposite. The thousands on hand at Madison Square Garden cheered and laughed at the F-bombs, S-bombs and other bombs thrown out by the various speakers and warm-up acts for Mr. Trump. It clearly is part of the testosterone-driven appeal: Real men curse. Mr. Trump is a real man. What they want is a real man for president.

In total, a computer search of 17 of the speakers at Madison Square Garden found epithets used at least 43 times. One of the most prolific was Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host. “What a sick son of a bitch,” he said of Hillary Clinton. “The whole fucking party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters and lowlives. Every one of them.”

Scott LoBaido, an artist, flipped the bird to the Democrats and called Mr. Trump “the greatest fucking president in the world.”

Tony Hinchcliffe, the comic who made insulting jokes about Latino sexual practices, likewise disparaged Jews and Palestinians and called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” the only comment the Trump campaign later disavowed.

Mr. Trump himself was somewhat more reticent at Madison Square Garden, deploying an “ass,” a couple of “damns,” eight “hells” and a “shit.” But at other recent rallies, he has called Ms. Harris “a shit vice president” and used the same word at a Catholic charity dinner in front of New York’s cardinal.

At one appearance in February before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump spiced his speech with no fewer than 44 epithets. “I got indicted four times by this gang of thugs for nothing, or as I say respectfully to the people from foreign countries, for bullshit,” he said at one point.

The computer analysis showed that Mr. Trump’s use of curses has been on the rise particularly in the past few months as the campaign heated up. But Mr. Trump, now 78, did not resort to such language nearly as much during the final months of the 2020 campaign, according to the analysis, and some experts point to his increased profanity as an example of “disinhibition,” a trait often found with aging as people become less restrained in what they say.