Taylor Swift’s Three-Word Burn of J. D. Vance
6 min read
The last three words of Taylor Swift’s latest Instagram post were the funniest. After yesterday’s presidential debate, a new picture appeared in her feed, which has 283 million followers. Swift was holding her cat Benjamin Button, and the message was signed off: “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” Just from that, you can guess what the rest of the caption contains: an endorsement of the Democrats in November.
In her post, Swift described Kamala Harris as a “steady-handed, gifted leader” and praised her running mate, Tim Walz, who she said “has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”
The caption didn’t mention Donald Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance—and it didn’t need to. Anyone who follows politics knows that Vance has repeatedly suggested that childless women are “miserable,” and that people who aren’t parents do not have a “personal and direct stake” in the future of America. In an interview with Fox News in 2021, he summed up his views in a memorable phrase: that the country was being run by a “bunch of childless cat ladies.”
Swift’s response—wryly applying that label to herself, as a successful pop star with a gazillion fans, a billion-dollar net worth, and a handsome football-player boyfriend—suggests that she might be the last living exponent of the Obama-era ideal of staying classy in the face of provocation. Remember “When they go low, we go high”? Very 2016. The Democrats’ convention in August showed that the party has given up on trying to rise above Trump’s outrages and has instead embraced being salty in return: The high/lowlight was when Senator Elizabeth Warren, 75, made a couch joke. Even Barack Obama slyly referred to the small size of Trump’s … crowds. (The Democrats liked that one so much they have turned it into an advert.)
By contrast, Swift’s endorsement was incredibly restrained. She made a positive case for the Democrats’ policy platform on the issues she cares about, with only a glancing reference to Trump’s “chaos,” and ended with a suggestion that fans register to vote, do their own research, and make their own choices. This was not a thunderous denunciation of Trump as an urgent threat to democracy. Nor did it use any of the language popular with left-leaning online sites in the late 2010s and 2020s, where writers agonized over staying friends with Republican voters, or whether to talk to their Trumpy uncle at Thanksgiving. Swift’s statement merely outlined her own decision, and acknowledged that other people might make a different one.
That is more radical than it might seem—because Swift will take criticism from both sides as a result. Mainstream Democrats, of course, are delighted: When Walz received the news live on MSNBC, he clenched his fist to his heart in appreciation. But some of her most ardent fans will find the endorsement tepid, and her criticisms of Trump and Vance too muted. Plenty of leftists will be angry that she didn’t mention Gaza. The very online right, meanwhile, is likely to lose its mind that the endorsement exists at all.
Because Swift is such a big star, who has written so personally about her life, some of her fans feel a sense of ownership over her. She faced a backlash recently for hugging Brittany Mahomes, the wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, when both attended the U.S. Open. (Brittany Mahomes has liked pro-Trump posts on Instagram.) The usual Swiftie Kremlinology spread across social media: Did Swift look like she was into the hug, or doing it grudgingly? Did she avoid Mahomes for the rest of the match? And why had they sat in separate suites at the Chiefs game the previous week? Maybe Swift does hate and reject her after all! However, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one: Swift gets on okay with her boyfriend’s teammate and his wife, despite their different political leanings. That used to be quite normal. Perhaps Swift would like it to be normal again.
On the right, the early response to the endorsement demonstrates once again that if Swift has a superpower—apart from writing catchy hooks about heartbreak—it is making her critics reveal themselves as oddballs. Within hours of her Instagram endorsement, Elon Musk had taken to X to offer his thoughts: “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” Exactly why Swift would want one of Musk’s dozen children is anyone’s guess. Oh, wait—I’m hearing in my earpiece that Musk was offering Swift his semen. See what I mean? Musk could have just disagreed with her, but instead he got creepy in a public forum. Another one for the “weird” file.
Obviously, Trump himself will be disappointed in Swift’s backing of Harris: After she endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, Trump joked that he liked her music “about 25 per cent less now.” According to a recent book about his old show, The Apprentice, he has described Swift as “unusually beautiful” and asked an interviewer: “She is liberal, or is that just an act?” He seems genuinely confused that someone could start out in country music and not vote Republican.
If the former president is upset, he has only himself to blame. Swift’s statement refers to “the dangers of spreading misinformation” and her fears about the misuse of artificial intelligence. She mentions Trump’s decision to post fake AI images on Truth Social of “Swifties for Trump,”a parade of eerily similar blond women holding signs supporting him. Trump’s caption said, “I accept!”—which might read as a joke if his entire campaign strategy did not involve blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Witness how both Trump and Vance embraced a fake news story about Haitians eating cats, which Vance tried to suggest was true in spirit, because immigration is a problem, even if not, you know, actually true in the sense that it happened. “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing,” Vance declared on X. Swift took a rather different approach. “The simplest way to combat misinformation,” she wrote, “is with the truth.”
The endorsement inevitably made me think of the pivotal scene in Netflix’s Miss Americana, an authorized documentary about Swift, which shows her father, Scott, warning her in 2018 not to endorse a Democratic candidate for the Senate in Tennessee. Swift had spoken about how she was encouraged to stay out of politics as a country artist, particularly after fans and the music industry punished the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks) for criticizing George W. Bush and the Iraq war. In the scene, Scott Swift voices concerns about her personal safety, because she has already had stalkers, and he also edges toward Michael Jordan’s famous formulation that “Republicans buy sneakers too.” But she goes ahead anyway. Today, the stakes are even higher. Swift now sits atop one of the biggest brands in the American entertainment industry—and through her boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the NFL’s Chiefs, she has strong links to another one. This endorsement carries professional and personal risks.
What is so striking about her statement, though, is not that a 34-year-old childless woman would support the Democrats—in demographic terms, that makes perfect sense. What is most interesting is her tone. Kamala Harris has largely ditched Biden’s strategy of warning about Trump’s threat to democracy, in favor of running an old-school campaign about values and competence. In a similar vein, Taylor Swift has provided an understated condemnation of the Republican platform and a measured endorsement of the Democrats. Plus, of course, that one precision-targeted jab on behalf of childless cat ladies everywhere.
