Brace yourself for a curse word. If it pleases you to censor the word in your mind, go ahead. If you’d prefer to think of it as f*****s, that’s fine too. If you’d rather spell it the way Norman Mailer did in his novel The Naked and the Dead – where the soldiers told each other, “Fug you!” – then go for it. But I’m going for the real thing, because, as George Carlin used to say, it’s just vowels and consonants. And because it’s our latest asymmetric absurdity.

In a new interview posted by Glamour magazine, Jen O’Malley Dillion, the incoming deputy chief of staff for the Biden administration, riffed: “The president-elect was able to connect with people over (his call for) unity. In the primary, people would mock him, like, ‘You think you can work with Republicans?’ I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of fuckers. Mitch McConnell is terrible…From start to finish, (Biden) set out with this idea that unity was possible, that together we are stronger, that we, as a country, need healing, and our politics needs that too…It is like a relationship. You can’t do politics alone. If the other person is not willing to do the work, then that becomes really hard. I think, more than not, people want to see impact. They want to see us moving in a path forward.”

In context, Dillon was basically saying that in politics you need to work with people you don’t like in order to serve the national interest. Nothing shocking about that. But the f-word depiction has compelled Republicans to clutch their pearls and wonder aloud how anyone could possibly say such a mean nasty thing about them.

Marco Rubio fumed that the curse word shows us what the Democrats “really think.” White House short-time propaganda minister Kayleigh McEnany got the vapors on Twitter: “They think we are deplorable, irredeemable “F***ers. SICK.”

Well, folks, I looked up the bad word in my political dictionary, and here’s what I found, by way of description.

Fuckers (noun, slang): A group of people who sought to destroy a free and fair election to abet an authoritarian takeover; who still refuse, in great numbers, to acknowledge the result of that election; who said and did nothing while an enemy nation cyber-attacked key national security agencies; who sold out America by staying silent when their Leader dismissed the intelligence community’s consensus that Putin had invaded the 2016 election, siding with Putin’s denial instead; who voted to exonerate their Leader after he was impeached for trying to smear his future Democratic opponent with fake foreign dirt; who said and did nothing when their Leader attacked his Democratic opponent as senile and his vice-presidential opponent as a “communist” and “monster”; who said and did nothing when their Leader called other countries “shitholes”; who stood by their Leader after he boasted about “grabbing women by the pussy”; who indulged their Leader after he called black football players “sons of bitches”; who looked askance when their Leader referred to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee as “Little Adam Schitt”; who never uttered a peep when Trump fans adopted “Fuck Your Feelings” as their motto; who have refused, ever since the spring, to pass a second stimulus package to help Americans stricken by the economic fallout of the pandemic; who said and did nothing while their Leader assailed science and allowed a pandemic to ravage the nation to the tune of 309,000 deaths and counting.

Wow, the dictionary definition of fuckers goes on for several more pages. My advice to the Trumpist Republicans: Suck it up, snowflakes. You earned it.

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Meanwhile, it looks like there’s trouble in exile. Trump basically left New York four years ago, moving to Florida for tax purposes. But the word in Palm Beach is that his neighbors don’t want him living at Mar-a-Lago, either; apparently it would violate an agreement he signed 27 years ago, barring the use of the club as a residence. But he need not be concerned. I’m sure that Vladimir Putin would give him a dacha, as a reward for his dutiful service as Russia’s doormat.