MORE MAGA MADNESS

Why Trumpers are losing it over Taylor Swift

Swift goes to football games to support her boyfriend, shattering MAGA brains.

NOAH BERLATSKY
JAN 31, 2024

Kelce and Swift celebrate the Chiefs’ win Sunday. (Patrick Smith/Getty)

MAGA this week at last found its true, final, most hated enemy. Not Barack Obama. Not Hilary Clinton. Not Joe Biden. Not even Hunter Biden. No, the epitome of everything Trumpers set themselves against is not a politician at all, but that nefarious pop singer/songwriter, Taylor Swift.

Swift is not running for election and is not really a political figure. Thus targeting her seems at best pointless and at worst counterproductive for a political movement.

But the conservative media marketplace often has different incentives than the Republican Party — which is part of why the Republican Party is such a mess. Swift’s music now effectively functions as the soundtrack for the GOP crawling into a dumpster and setting itself on fire.

Taylor Swift (The GOP Version)


Why have Republicans chosen this moment for their much-more-than-two-minutes Swift hate? Well, this week Swift released a provocative album titled The GOP Sucks and So Does Donald Trump.

Ha ha. No, she didn’t do anything like that at all. Instead, her sin was … attending a football game. Last Sunday, she went to see the Kansas City Chiefs/Baltimore Ravens matchup because she’s dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — who has been reviled by the right for making ads for the Pfizer covid vaccine and (gulp) alleged woke beer brand Bud Light. The Chiefs won, giving them a berth in the Super Bowl and destroying right-wing talking points about Swift being the Chiefs’ Yoko Ono.

This didn’t age well. (Source: twitter)

During the game, cameras kept panning to catch Swift’s reaction, which makes sense since she’s a massively famous pop star and her presence at NFL games this season is driving huge TV ratings.

Swift didn’t ham it up for the cameras to try to make herself a focus of attention. Nonetheless, her presence annoyed right-wing punditry, which saw Swift and collectively started gibbering and snorting like rabid warthogs.

“End Wokeness,” a large right-wing account that Elon Musk is fond of, tweeted that “What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic and natural. It’s an op.”

Source: twitter

Washed up GOP primary contender Vivek Ramaswamy doubled-down on that barmy intuition. He suggested the Super Bowl is going to be rigged in favor of the Chiefs in order to boost a Taylor Swift endorsement of Democratic President Joe Biden.

Source: twitter

As this newsletter is being readied for publication late Tuesday, examples of right-wing figures revealing that Swift has given them a terminal case of brainworms are so plentiful that it would be impossible to cite them all.

Newsmax host Greg Kelly went as far Monday as to accuse Swifties of “elevating her to an idol … and you’re not supposed to do that. In fact, if you look it up in the Bible, it’s a sin!” Another Newsmax host dismissed the Swift-Kelce relationship as “fake.”

Meanwhile, one of Fox News’ “hard news” shows devoted a segment to attacking Swift, her fans, and Kelce, who a commentator derisively referred to as “Mr. Pfizer.”


But that was nowhere near as wild as a segment earlier this month during which Fox News host Jesse Waters described Swift a “Pentagon asset” developed at a NATO meeting and deployed to help Democrats.

Source: twitter

I can’t believe this needs to be said, but Taylor Swift is not a Pentagon asset. She is not an op. She is not inorganic. She’s a successful pop singer and people pay attention to her because SHE’S A MASSIVELY SUCCESSFUL POP SINGER, OMFG, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?

Sorry. Deep breaths.
Taylor Swift is very popular

As I was saying, people want to see and talk about Taylor Swift because she’s an extremely popular singer, songwriter, and performer—now in a high profile relationship with a very well-known celebrity football player. Right-wing media pretends there’s a mystery. But there really isn’t one.

So, why does MAGAs want to pretend Swift’s existence is a deadly and convoluted plot? Part of the animosity is that the formerly apolitical singer has made her partisan preferences clear. In 2018 she endorsed two Democratic candidates in Tennessee. She’s also spoken in favor of LGBT rights, and has become a very effective advocate for voter registration. In 2020, she endorsed Biden, and the White House is (reasonably) hoping she’ll endorse him in 2024 as well. (The prospect of Swift again endorsing Biden has Trump grousing and MAGA elites plotting a “holy war” against her, according to Rolling Stone.)

Republicans loathe successful single women, especially if they’re Democrats. So it’s not exactly a surprise that they hate Swift.

But the right hates lots of people. The reason they want to hate and talk about Taylor Swift in particular is exactly the same reason everyone else wants to talk about Taylor Swift. When you are extremely popular, articles and news reports about you (like this one!) are also likely to be very popular.

Swift was one of the most well-known people on earth before she met Kelce. Now she’s even more famous. If you post a tweet making outrageous claims about Taylor Swift, or film a segment making even more outrageous claims about Taylor Swift, you are likely to attract a lot of potentially monetizable eyeballs.

The celebrity ate the party

Attracting monetizable eyeballs is great when you’re a media personality. Politics, though, is not really about monetizable eyeballs and hate clicks. On the contrary, if you’re a GOP strategist, having your party rush to associate itself with hating on Taylor Swift doesn’t make much sense.

Swift has large numbers of very enthusiastic fans who are not going to vote for an anti-Taylor Swift party. But more than that, most normal people do not see Swift as a partisan figure. They see her as a pop star. If you start talking about how Taylor Swift is actually a psy op, people who are not already your committed partisans are going to think you are a ridiculous and dangerous crank. In fact, even some of your committed partisans are likely to think that.

Swift celebrates while watching Kelce play in KC on Jan. 13. (Jamie Squire/Getty)

Because (and I am trying not to resort to all caps again here) Taylor Swift is not some sort of abominable engineered NATO superweapon. For pity’s sake.

Right-wing media sees Swift as a great bête noire. For the GOP as a party which theoretically wants to win elections, though, choosing elaborately nonsensical culture war battles with popular celebrities has no real upside. You gain no voters, alienate die-hard Swifties forever, and make a lot of people potentially on the fence think that you’ve lost a whole shelfful of gourds.

There’s a good argument that the GOP has for some time been out of gourds, in no small part because right-wing media ate them. Republican politicians today often seem more focused on media hits, and the consequent fundraising bonanza, than they are on passing conservative policies.

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Texas Sen. Ted Cruz may be AWOL when his state suffers a national disaster, but he never misses an opportunity to promote his podcast. Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz — a key figure in this session’s rolling leadership fiasco — has introduced virtually no bills of significance. But he’s on Newsmax constantly, and a CNN analysis found 160,000 articles about him, in comparison to 347 about a congressman in Gaetz’s neighboring district. Blowing up the party is good for business—and the business is, not politics, but right-wing media.

The best and most virulently bellowing example of right-wing media steamrolling GOP priorities is former president and leading GOP presidential contender Donald Trump himself. Trump, a real estate heir, has structured his entire life for decades as an exercise in self-promotion, putting his name in big letters on hotels, resorts, ice rinks, and even steaks. Pre-presidency, he was most famous as a reality television star.

It’s not a coincidence, given his instincts, that Trump has attacked Swift himself. He was angered when Swift won Time Magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year, since he wanted to win it himself. With his usual class, he’s also said that Swift and Kelce will "most likely not" enjoy life together. (Trump has of course been indicted for 2016 payments made to adult actress Stormy Daniels during the presidential campaign; he was trying to prevent her from revealing that Trump was unfaithful to his wife, Melania.)

Trump’s celebrity gave his 2016 campaign a major boost. The networks loved him for much the same reason as they love Swift — famous people are famous and attract eyeballs. He got $5 billion in free media from both right-wing and mainstream networks, which gave him a significant advantage in the Republican primary. In a real sense, media chose the GOP’s candidate for the party based on entertainment value.

The GOP did narrowly win the presidency with Trump in 2016. But their less and less entertaining celebrity candidate led them to election defeats in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023. That’s not a great record, even if you ignore Trump’s effort to block the rightful transfer of power after his 2020 loss, or the fact that a jury just ordered him to pay $83 million to a woman he was found liable of assaulting, or any of the other numerous catastrophic moral failures which are now pancaked onto the GOP like Trump’s orange makeup.

“Don’t get involved in politics!”

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, also eager to make money off of Taylor Swift’s name, joined in the pile on, giving the singer some advice on Monday.

“Don’t get involved in politics!” Pirro blustered. “We don’t want to see you there!”

The funny thing about Pirro’s recommendation is that it could as easily be directed at that tiresome celebrity Donald Trump — or at right-wing media as a whole.

Swift makes the occasional endorsement or tells people to go vote; she’s participating in the political process, not driving it.

But conservative media (dis)infotainment has insinuated itself into the GOP so thoroughly that you can barely tell one from the other. The Taylor Swift crisis is every bit as fictional as the “border crisis,” or as the supposed crisis of election integrity which Trump used as the pretense for his coup attempt. Wild nonsense which attracts eyeballs has become the GOP brand.

Spewing venom at random passersby is, again, not a great way to garner votes. That’s one reason the GOP keeps losing elections. Will they continue their streak in 2024? Even Taylor Swift can’t see the future. But we do know that in general, people who pick a fight with her don’t win.

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