MAGA versus Taylor Swift

Taylor_Swift_The_Eras_Tour_Midnights_Era_Set_(53110103078) Photo by Paolo V, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The Presidential Race in the Face-Palming Year of Our Lord 2024 is probably the first where both parties effectively have an incumbent running for reelection. As a result, both primaries are essentially over and it’s not even Groundhog Day. That has left us with news, political and social media machines absolutely starving for content. There’s only so many articles you can write about why Ron DeSantis didn’t try to be more human during the campaign or why Nikki Haley only chose now to actually attack Trump. And so we now enter the long spring of our discontent. There’s no Elizabeth Warren to quixotically endorse. There’s no Pete Buttigieg to fluff. There’s no Marco Rubio to watch reboot on live television. So what do we do?

Apparently, attack one of the most popular women in the world:

The online world’s capacity for wild, untamed nonsense is endless. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that this is the reason we keep coming back to the old social-media watering hole, despite its regular and casual carnage — you never know when the next pack of ravening hyenas will go tearing after a random gazelle. And the chase is on yet again, this time with the Trumpist Right jackaling off in pursuit of none other than Taylor Swift. You see, pop megastar Taylor Swift — known Democrat — is dating NFL tight end Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, who are headed to the Super Bowl after yesterday’s victory against the Baltimore Ravens. (I’m sorry to have to be the first person to tell you all of this.)

Surely some sinister political mischief is afoot. Publicity-hungry pop stars and handsome athletes with reality-TV-show experience don’t just go hooking up like that, now do they? One necessarily wonders which shadowy puppet master is really pulling the strings here. So America’s foremost former junior intelligence officer, Pizzagater, and MAGA-branded influencer Jack Posobiec was on the case yesterday afternoon, as the Ravens were frittering away opportunity after opportunity: “Thinking about when Taylor Swift called out the Soros family in 2019 for buying the rights to her music and then how she came out a super liberal in 2020.” (This refers to a far-right conspiracy theory I’m embarrassed to admit exists, holding that Taylor Swift made a secret deal with George Soros to get the rights to her music back in return for becoming a Democratic partisan.)

Vivek Ramaswany, having stepped down from his position as Presidential Candidate The Public Most Wants to See Dangled from a Basketball Hoop By His Underwear, has chimed in as well, implying, I think, that the NFL is going to rig the Super Bowl for Kansas City in exchange for Swift endorsing Biden. I can only sum up this conspiracy theory with a Simpsons clip:

As Blehar points out (and I strongly recommend reading his post), this isn’t just Posobiec and Vivek, who latch onto crackpottery the way a particularly dim remora might latch onto the business end of a Great White. The idea that there is … something … going on with Taylor Swift has spread through the Right Wing faster than diarrhea at Lauren Boebert’s restaurant. Even the ones who shy away from the conspiracy theories are dumping on her. Swift was mostly non-political until relatively recently, when she started to tentatively endorse Democrats in a fairly generic left-of-center way.

Although … one branch of the conspiracy theory is that Swift was actually a conservative because, during her very public fight over the rights to her music, she criticized a number of the groups controlling those rights, including Soros Fund Management. She was then either blackmailed by the Deep State into supporting Biden or support Biden in exchange for her current success, and maybe Kelce’s too. No, I am not making this up.

The one thing the MAGA movement cannot tolerate is dissent. Any criticism of Trump, least of all an endorsement of his opponent, instantly moves one from favored status to Enemy of the State. And so social media is filled with ridiculous posts like this.

Who thinks this country needs a lot more women like Alina Habba, and a lot less like Taylor Swift?🙋🏼‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/TdIq5wEqLR

— 🔥Desiree🔥 (@DesireeAmerica4) January 27, 2024

I mean, Taylor Swift is self-made billionaire who is currently on a record-smashing tour and has become an avatar of the AFC Champion Kansas City Chiefs. Habba, by contrast, has been losing every case, racking up nearly a million in sanctions for bad lawyering and is facing a big ethics complaint. But Habba lashes out at the press and liberals, so I guess that’s what tickles MAGA’s fancy. Swift, by contrast, plays the media like a golden fiddle.

I might dismiss this as a stupid social media kerfuffle except that it has now apparently reached the Trump campaign itself, with members of the campaign promising a “holy war” against Swift if she endorses Biden and Trump himself grousing that he’s more popular than she is.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the point I want to focus on is this:

Celebrity endorsement don’t mean crap.

“But Mike”, you cry, “there was a poll that showed that 20% of Swift’s fans will vote the way she tells the to!” To which I respond, that’s because they already know who she’s going to endorse. And Trump’s obnoxiousness, destruction of Roe and liability for assaulting E. Jean Carrol have already made him wildly unpopular with women in general and specifically the young women who are the core of Swift’s fandom. If her fans thought for a second she was going to endorse Trump, then that 20% would refrain and a different 20% would say they’ll vote the way she says.

Taylor Swift may be the most popular and powerful entertainer in the world right now. But even she can not overcome one of the most basic realities of American politics: people don’t actually care what celebrities think. If the celebrity endorses their politics they love it. If a celebrity goes against their politics, they hate it. If James Woods came out in favor of Biden, his haters would turn into fans and his fans would turn into haters. And the same thing would happen if George Clooney suddenly bunny-snuggled Trump. When it comes to politics and celebrities, the former drives our respect for the latter, not the other way around. Maybe it can make a difference in turnout. But even then, the effect is marginal at best.

So ultimately, we come back around to where we started this post. There is a massive vacuum in political discourse right now and it is, for the moment, being filled by the most famous woman in the country. Maybe they’ll move on; maybe this silliness will continue all summer. The Right Wing are convinced that they destroyed Bud Light for an endorsement, so they might be thirsty for more. Or they may grow tired and move onto something more lucrative than Swift-bashing.¹

For the record, while I am technically a “Swiftie” that refers to my involvement with the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, not to Miss Swift herself.² I don’t hate her music but I’m not a fan either (although I think she is quite good when she goes “unplugged” with just an acoustic guitar). There was a time when my wife and I were trying to have our second and were on the road constantly between State College and the fertility clinic in Maryland. This was when “Blank Space” was being played roughly every four minutes by radio stations and we grew to fear the song. But I admire her as a businesswoman and performer. She seems to have a good support team and a good head on her shoulders. I don’t begrudge her an iota of her success. And I can’t bring myself to hate someone and something that brings so many people so much joy.

We’re going to see her on camera a lot during the Super Bowl. The Chiefs might win and there will be lots of speculation on her and Kelce’s future. She’ll endorse Biden. The Right will rage. The extremely online pro-Hamas left might as well. But her tour will go on and politics will go on and the world will keep spinning. Because, for most sane people, sports and music are far more important than politics.

1. I would note we seem to have moved on from when the NFL was going to be destroyed because of players kneeling for the anthem.
2. When I moved here to work on Swift the Mission, Swift the Singer was building up to a concert in State College. My move-addled brain was quite confused by all the news reports about Swift fans.