Taylor Swift May Yet Save Joe Biden

Never underestimate the ability of the American right to promote outlandish lies. This is a lesson we’ve learned time and again in the 21st century, a pattern that includes the Bush administration’s fabulation of weapons of mass destruction that was deployed to sell the Iraq war, as well as the right-wing’s mainstreaming of climate change denial, QAnon conspiracy theories, and anti-vaxxing pseudo-science.

Taylor Swift, far and away the most popular musician in the world at this moment—who just won a record-breaking fourth Album of the Year Grammy last night—is the latest victim of the right’s propensity for passing off bizarre fictions as fact. This is not completely unexpected, since anti-Swift ire has for many months been on the rise on the right, particularly among former president Donald Trump’s supporters. Last October, when the anti-Swifties were merely frothing but not yet completely deranged, I wrote a column looking at the antipathy MAGA-heads had for the singer. I highlighted the fact that Swift is an avatar of female independence, prompting an allergic reaction among ideological misogynists.

But even as I took note of the coalescing anti-Swift Weltanschauung, I hadn’t realized how truly unhinged it would become. Over the last few weeks, the conspiracy theory has taken hold on the right that the current romance between Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce (already unpopular on the right for his endorsement of vaccines) is a conspiracy to help steal the election from Donald Trump. This alleged plot against America is supposedly organized by some combination of the deep state and George Soros. The theory holds that the Super Bowl will be rigged so the Kansas City Chiefs win. Swift and Kelce will then reign as America’s most beloved couple, possibly on the path to marriage. They will then use their cultural clout to give Joe Biden a much-needed boost.

This idea has become pervasive in the right-wing media, including Fox News. Donald Trump and his staff are said to be privately fuming at Swift and planning retribution. Former presidential candidate and current Trump booster Vivek Ramaswamy gave a just-asking-questions endorsement of the theory last Monday tweeting:

I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.

This conspiracy theory is partly an example of how partisanship can poison the mind. Although largely apolitical for most of her career, in recent years Swift has become more vocal on a few issues: endorsing a Democrat in the 2018 Tennessee Senate race and Joe Biden in the 2020 election, encouraging her fans to register to vote, and speaking out on behalf of reproductive freedom as well as LGBTQ+ rights. Writing in Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley notes, “The conspiratorial speculation does have a distant connection to political reality. The New York Times has reported that Biden’s campaign is hoping Swift will endorse him, as she did in 2020, and Rolling Stone reports that Trump advisers are discussing how to attack Swift.”

But all the positions that Swift takes mark her not as a radical but as a perfectly typical woman in her 30s (the singer is 34). It’s the typicality of Swift, rather than any putative radicalism, that makes her a target for the right. She is truly a generational voice, and that generation was in fact crucial for Biden’s victory in 2020.

As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann rightly noted, the attacks on Swift echo the long history of reactionary scolds demonizing independent women, ranging from the flappers of the 1920s to the unmarried mothers of the 1990s (personified by the sitcom character Murphy Brown, subject of the bizarre fulminations of then–Vice President Dan Quayle).