Why is the right obsessed with Taylor Swift?

Any number of issues are at stake in the 2024 election: The future of democracy, immigration, America's role in helping Ukraine. It might be — again — the most important election of our lifetime.

This week, though, we're talking about Taylor Swift.

"Conservative media personalities are raging" over Swift, Axios reported, seeing the "pop megastar" — and onetime endorser of President Joe Biden — as a public figure whose fans "heed her calls to go out and vote." Right-wing figures like Fox News' Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and Donald Trump lawyer Alina Habba have started speculating that Swift's relationship with football star Travis Kelce is part of "a deep state psyop orchestrated by the NFL and Democrats to work in President Biden's favor."

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No. Really.

Swift's all-encompassing fame has even earned Trump's attention. Rolling Stone reported the former president has "privately claimed that he is 'more popular'" than the singer. Trump was even reportedly astounded when Swift beat him out for Time Magazine's 2023 "Person of the Year." (Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were actually the other finalists.) And his team is trying to figure out how to respond if Swift endorses Biden again. "Another left-wing celebrity who is part of the Democrat elite telling you what to think," sniffed a member of Trump's campaign team. What is going on?

What did the commentators say?

"The online world's capacity for wild, untamed nonsense is endless," Jeffrey Blehar lamented at National Review, a conservative outlet. Right-wing conspiracy-mongering about Swift and Kelce reflects "thinly veiled bleats of fear about Trump's standing with women." And for many American women — "except your 85-year-old nana" — Swift has become a "cultural avatar." But if those women abandon Trump, it's more likely because of things like the $83 million judgment he must pay after E. Jean Carroll's defamation lawsuit. "It won't be because of anything Taylor Swift said or did."

Conservatism's Taylor Swift obsession reflects the right's "inability to just be normal itself, even for a minute," Ross Douthat, himself a conservative, argued at The New York Times. Hostility toward the singer has been growing since she endorsed Democratic candidates in 2018 and 2020. But her relationship with Kelce "has transformed a merely unfavorable impression into outright paranoia." Too bad: The Swift-Kelce romance offers the "romantic iconography that much of the online right supposedly wants to encourage and support."

"Maybe Republicans should wonder why all the attractive, likable people hate them?" Brian Beutler asked at his Off Message Substack. There's no conspiracy in the Swift-Kelce romance: "At the highest echelons of the cultural elite, attractive people like Swift and Kelce meet and fall in love" all the time. The Republican Party should focus less on the strange conspiracy theorizing and focus more on "trying to be decent and likable" if it wants to appeal to women voters.

What next?

There's a danger to Trump in the right's Swift obsession, E.J. Montini argued at The Arizona Republic. Turning against America's most-beloved pop star is "the dumbest thing the MAGA cult and its media enablers have done." Why? Because a Swift endorsement really "could alter the election's outcome." One poll showed that 53% of Americans are fans of the singer. She has more than 500 million social media followers. She has reach that would make any campaign envious. Why mess with that? All the online hostility "may be guaranteeing that Swift, at some point, will endorse President Joe Biden."

If so, Trump's allies are prepared. Biden might be counting on Swift to save him, "but voters are looking at these sky-high inflation rates and saying, 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,'" Jason Miller, a Trump adviser, wrote to Rolling Stone. At this point, though, the feeling might be entirely mutual.

Never mind all that election nonsense, though. Kelce's Kansas City team plays in the Super Bowl in less than two weeks. Swift, meanwhile, plays a concert in Tokyo the night before. Can she make it back to the United States in time to watch the big game? We'll find out. And bizarrely enough, the fate of the presidential election might ride on it.