Competing utterances refer to the utterances constructed by competitors to accomplish communicative goals in a certain context. In doing so, competitors typically employ various pragmatic strategies to realize their interactional goals, one of which is the impolite strategy. The study is structured theoretically around impoliteness, the impoliteness response model, and rapport management theory. The corpus of data consists of three presidential election campaigns in the United States in 2016. This study employs both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the impoliteness of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and their response strategies to quantify the differences in their pragmatic strategies and investigate the contextual effect of impoliteness strategy and the reasons for its use. Finally, the study demonstrates the explanatory capacity of impolite theory in conjunction with rapport management theory in competing utterances and elucidates the rapport-challenge orientation of competing utterances.