Taylor Swift says she didn't back a 2016 candidate because Trump was 'weaponizing' celebrity endorsements

Taylor Swift is opening up about choosing not to endorse a presidential candidate in 2016, explaining in a new interview that she feared she might actually do more harm than good.

The pop star, who prior to 2018 had faced some criticism for remaining apolitical, spoke with Vogue in a new interview published Thursday and said that in the last presidential election, "you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement."

Then-candidate Donald Trump, she explained without actually naming him, was "going around saying, 'I'm a man of the people. I'm for you. I care about you.'" For this reason, Swift felt she "wasn't going to help" by endorsing then-canditate Hillary Clinton. She goes on to say that another factor was that amid her feud with Kim Kardashian West, she was being attacked as "calculated," "manipulative," and a "liar," as was Clinton.

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"Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability?" Swift said she asked herself. "Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses."

In 2018, things changed for Swift when she endorsed two Tennessee Democrats, and she has recently been championing passage of the Equality Act and calling out Trump directly. Her recent pro-LGBTQ rights music video for "You Need to Calm Down" concludes by directing fans to a Change.org petition in favor of this Civil Rights Act amendment that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Swift told Vogue it was "devastating" when she discovered prior to this that her stance on LGBTQ rights wasn't "clear" enough, but she realized recently she "could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of," especially seeing as "rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male."