Last month on Truth Social, former President Trump reposted a collage of young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts. Most of the images clearly looked as if they’d been generated by AI.
“I accept!” Trump told his 7.1 million followers, prompting the world’s most famous childless cat lady to come at him with her claws out.
Opinion Columnist
Robin Abcarian
“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site,” Taylor Swift wrote on Instagram right after Vice President Kamala Harris wiped the floor with Trump in their first and probably only debate. “It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”
And so, she wrote, she will be voting for Harris for president, and signed her post “Childless Cat Lady.”
“I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift told her 284 million followers.
I don’t know how many of them are American voters, but it takes only a tiny fraction of that number to change an outcome in a battleground state. In 2020, for example, Wisconsin voters chose President Biden over then-President Trump by 20,682 votes. In Georgia, it was even closer. Biden won the state by 11,779 votes, prompting Trump’s infamous and arguably illegal plea to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 more votes. But I digress.
Swift also urged her legions of fans to register to vote, telling them, “Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. … Remember, that in order to vote, you have to be registered!” She linked to a voter registration site operated by the federal government and the effect was immediate. More than 405,000 visitors clicked on the link in the 24 hours after Swift posted.
Those clicks alone don’t necessarily translate into new registrations, or to votes. But Tom Bonier, of the data firm TargetSmart, said they might. “What we saw was this massive increase, we’re calling it the Swift Effect now,” Bonier said last week on “Face the Nation.” And, he added, according to data compiled since 2020, about 80% of voters who register this late in the election cycle actually end up voting.
A day after Swift’s endorsement, Trump melted down like the Wicked Witch of the West. “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” he screeched on Truth Social.
That seemed even less presidential than usual for Trump. The outburst prompted MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell to declare that he “has the most hateful mind and spirit in presidential history.”
O’Donnell researched presidential statements and was able to find only one other president who used the word “hate” so publicly, George H.W. Bush. I thought O’Donnell was going to mention Bush’s famous antipathy for broccoli, but he was referring to Bush’s 2002 profession of hatred for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
The thing about hate is that, like fear, it’s a powerful motivator. Hatred and fear, in fact, are the most important arrows in Trump’s political quiver, integral to his dark vision of an America that is falling apart and in need of a savior.
The Trump-Vance campaign’s scapegoating of legal immigrants from Haiti who have settled in Springfield, Ohio, is a natural, if inexcusable, extension of the politics of hate. Likewise, his bizarrely close relationship with kooky racist Islamophobe Laura Loomer and, of course, his enduring embrace of the white nationalists and Holocaust deniers who swirl around Mar-a-Lago.
His vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, is an exemplar of how hatred is integral to Trump’s success.
“I think our people hate the right people,” Vance said in an interview with the American Conservative in 2021, when he was seeking his Senate seat. Maybe this was supposed to be a clever throwaway quote, along the lines of comparing Democrats to childless cat ladies, a trope Vance originated at around the same time.
In profound ways, Vance’s hate comment distills the very ethos of the MAGA movement.
It’s too soon to know whether turning Trump’s hose of hatred on Swift will backfire on him.
But how delightful would it be for a Harris victory to come in on little cat feet?