I'm Not A Swifty But...

"Mainlining MAGA"

I have nothing but admiration for Taylor Swift but musically, my tastes go more in a Jesus and Mary Chain, Revolting Cocks, Patti Smith and Billie Eilish direction. Top 40 music hasn’t been my thing since my bar mitzvah. If I’m going to put some music on for a drive, I’d be more likely to put on a little Salamat and Nazakot Ali Khan than a Taylor Swift song.

However, isn’t it hilarious— and exciting— seeing Republicans going out of their minds over Taylor Swift? Poor Sean Hannity, even poorer Jesse Watters. Insane! On Tuesday, Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng reported that crazy old Trump wants to get into a dick measuring contest with her. She endorsed Biden in 2020 and the Trumpers expect her to do the same thing this year. “Behind the scenes, Trump has reacted to the possibility of Biden and Swift teaming up against him this year not with alarm, but with an instant projection of ego. In recent weeks, the former president has told people in his orbit that no amount of A-list celebrity endorsements will save Biden. Trump has also privately claimed that he is ‘more popular’ than Swift and that he has more committed fans than she does… Last month [he] commented to some confidants that it ‘obviously’ made no sense that he was not named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year— an honor that went to none other than Swift in December.”

She’s even replacing Hunter Biden as MAGA public enemy numero uno! “Swift’s music,” wrote Noah Berlatsky yesterday, “now effectively functions as the soundtrack for the GOP crawling into a dumpster and setting itself on fire.” Fox News:

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.

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.

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.

…[C]onservative 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. 

“Meanwhile,” concluded Rawnsley and Suebsaeng, “as Trump has been having a popularity contest with Swift in his own head, others close to him— including GOP operatives, some of his 2024 staff, and Trump-y media figures— have been brainstorming different ways to go after Swift. Since late last year, these Trump allies have repeatedly discussed how to turn the culture-warrior dial up to 11 if she re-endorses Biden this year, the sources recount. ‘It would be more fuel thrown onto the culture-war fires,’ says an official working on the Trump reelection efforts. ‘Another left-wing celebrity who is part of the Democrat elite telling you what to think.’… On Monday, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba shared a post on social media that includes the caption: ‘Who thinks this country needs a lot more women like Alina Habba, and a lot less like Taylor Swift?’… Former GOP presidential hopeful and current Trump hype man Vivek Ramaswamy took to Twitter following the latest Chiefs’ playoff win to claim that unnamed forces would rig the Super Bowl to give the as-yet nonexistent endorsement from the ‘artificially culturally propped-up couple’ increased visibility. MAGA pundits have spent months fuming about Swift and her boyfriend— already a hated figure for his role as a Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine spokesman. During a rant in November about the GOP’s losses across a string of state elections and abortion-related ballot initiatives, Turning Point USA founder and Trump ally Charlie Kirk warned that Swift was ‘going to come out in the presidential election’ and ‘mobilize her fans,’ adding that ‘all the Swifties want is swift abortion.’”

Well, at least they’ll always have Nugent, Kanye, Kid Rock, Gene Simmons, 50 Cent and Wayne Newton. Conservative podcaster Derek Hunter fretted yesterday that “Republicans are about to be blindsided by a pop culture tsunami called Taylor Swift. They are in no way ready for it. Republicans have always been terrible at reaching younger voters, mostly because they don’t really try. When they put the Republican National Committee chairwoman on the Sunday morning shows, the only twenty-somethings that reaches are the ones who fell asleep with the TV on, and are now too hung over to crawl to the coffee table and grab the remote… [N]o other artist today compares to Taylor Swift. For example, the mere fact that she is dating Kansas City Chiefs’ player Travis Kelce caused his jersey sales to increase by 400 percent, and that was just at the start of their relationship. With the Super Bowl looming, the sky is the limit. If Swift can make her audience take a sudden interest in football, to the point of buying the uniform of a player they’d probably never heard of before this season, just imagine what she could do if she actively tried to stir up support for something… Taylor Swift, on the other hand, has an audience of tens of millions of young people. There hasn’t been anything like her since the Beatles or Elvis. One word from her could move a mountain— or even more incredibly, make youngsters bother to care about someone as unappealing as Biden. What will the Republican response be? I grew up in Detroit and I like Kid Rock, but he’s no response to Swift’s army.”

OK, OK, let's put this topic to rest for now with a tweet from Digby: “Everyone's theorizing why Republicans are obsessing over Taylor Swift and there's some truth in all of it. But ultimately it's just the right wingers trying to intimidate her into staying out of the election by making her fear for her personal safety. That's what they do.”