Ratfucking is an American slang term for political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections. It was brought to public attention by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the book which chronicled their investigative reporting of the Watergate affair, All the President's Men.
Origins
Woodward and Bernstein’s account in All the President's Men reports that many Republican staffers had attended the University of Southern California and participated in the highly competitive student elections there. UPI reporter Karlyn Barker sent Woodward and Bernstein a memo, "Notes On the USC Crowd", that outlined the connection. Fraternities, sororities, and underground fraternal coordinating organizations—such as Theta Nu Epsilon and their splintered rival "Trojans for Representative Government"—engaged in creative tricks and underhanded tactics to win student elections. Officially, control over minor funding and decision-making on campus life was at stake, but the positions also gave bragging rights and prestige. The tactics were either promoted by or garnered the interest of major political figures on the USC board of trustees, such as Dean Rusk and John A. McCone. The young operators called these practices ratfucking.
A more benign use of the term "ratfucking" was commonplace in Southern California college slang from the late 1950s to at least the early 1960s, meaning a prank. Around that time, Tony Auth was the cartoonist for the UCLA Daily Bruin. One of his cartoons showed a large, inebriated rat suggesting to another rat, "Let's go PF-ing tonight!", a play on ratfucking or "RF-ing". The lead story in the January 6, 1961, California Tech, Caltech'sstudent newspaper, was headlined, "Tech Scores First Televised RF". The article chronicled the Great Rose Bowl Hoax, which had just taken place. A political context was irrelevant to such usage. At the end of the article, an Editor's Note both explained and bowdlerized: "RF is a contemporary college colloquialism for a clever prank." The term ratfucking is a slang term used by U.S. military personnel to mean the targeted pillaging of MREs, which the U.S. military calls field stripping. It refers to the process of opening a case of MREs, which are packed 12 in a box, opening up individual MRE packages, removing the desired items, and leaving the unenticing remainder.
An early use of the term appears in Edmund Wilson's The Twenties, in an entry dated February 1922. On May 23, 2019, Svetlana Lokhova filed a claim in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia against Stefan Halper, claiming that "Stefan Halper is a ratfucker and a spy" with a footnote that "Ratfucking" is a well-known political term. The term was used by the character Jimmy McGill in season 2, episode 10, of the television showBetter Call Saul, after he pulled a dirty trick on his brother Chuck. In HBO's satire drama Succession season 2, Sam is described as 'Ratfucker Sam' for his efforts to debunk so called rats who turn against people, hence the term by the character Logan Roy.
