‘Oh My God!’ Jonathan Swan Cracks Up Audience With Accidental F-Bomb at Quaker School Event

New York Times reporter and best-selling author Jonathan Swan inadvertently dropped an f-bomb while speaking about Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, the recently released book he wrote with his co-author Maggie Haberman at a Quaker school in Washington, D.C. this week.

Swan and Haberman addressed an audience at Sidwell Friends School on behalf of the legendary D.C. bookstore, Politics and Prose.

The moderator, Tim Alberta with The Atlantic, asked the authors about the book’s dark humor.

“I’m wondering if that was intentional or if it was cathartic, or if it was needed for the two of you. Because one of the questions that I saw that was submitted to us is, ‘How did the two of you keep your sanity in this process?'” he wondered.

“Well, in order to keep sanity, you have to have it in the first place,” Swan said to audience laughter. “And I’m not even being glib. Like, we’re not exactly stable people. We both work like maniacs. You know us. We have, you know, killed ourselves for many, many years reporting on this. So, I would just, you know, say that that didn’t exist as a condition, a precondition for this book. Maybe it’s a precondition to be in our state to be able to do this kind of reporting.”

“There is a lot of unintentional comedy that just naturally plays out in these rooms,” Swan added. “I’ll give you an example, which is like, it’s kind of f*cked up.”

Swan immediately caught himself, exclaiming, “Pardon me! I’m sorry if there’s kids here. But, I’m sorry, it’s a Quaker school. Oh, my God! I’m sorry! No, I’m genuinely sorry, and there’s probably kids here.”

Swan continued:

So there’s a scene where Trump has come up with his idea to displace two million Palestinians out of Gaza, right? Which would have been ethnic cleansing on a historic scale. One of the most poorly thought through ideas in a series of poorly thought through ideas. But went through no policy process, right? This was not workshopped inside the Pentagon. It wasn’t workshopped inside the State Department. He’d kind of mused about it a couple of times privately. But then [Benjamin] Netanyahu comes in, visits, and he just announces it as fully-formed policy.

We have a scene just before that announcement where Trump is in the room with a few of his aides…And Stephen Cheung’s like, “What do you guys, should we just own Gaza? Should we just own it, you know?” And it was this sort of moment where they were trying to understand what that would entail. And Mike Waltz said, “Well, we have to make clear that that doesn’t involve American troops, you know, on the ground. And he’s, you know, he’s a Green Beret. He knows of what he speaks. And Trump says to Cheung, “What do you think about this idea? You like this idea?” And Cheung’s standing there. And according to our reporting, there’s a pause, and he goes, “It’s a strong move, sir.”

With that, Swan burst out laughing.

“I don’t know why, just something about that is like, it’s like, there’s an absurdist quality to a lot of the dialogue.”

Watch the clip above via YouTube.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!