Last month, former President Trump reposted a collage on Truth Social of young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, with most of the images clearly appearing to be generated by AI.
“I accept!” Trump told his 7.1 million followers, as the world’s most famous childfree cat lover pounced on him, claws in hand.
“I recently learned that an AI of ‘me’ was posted on his site falsely endorsing Donald Trump for president,” Taylor Swift said, shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris dominated Trump in their first, and likely only, debate. “It really brought back my fears about AI and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It has led me to the conclusion that, as a voter, I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election. The easiest way to combat misinformation is to tell the truth.”
She then wrote that she planned to vote for Harris and the “childless cat lady” for president.
“I think she’s a calm, talented leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm instead of chaos,” Swift told her 284 million followers.
We don’t know how many of those are American voters, but even a tiny fraction of them is enough to change the outcome in battleground states. In 2020, for example, Wisconsin voters chose President Biden over then-President Trump. In Georgia, it was even closer: Biden won the state by 11,779 votes, and Trump’s infamous and possibly illegal Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “found” another 11,780 votes for Biden. But I digress.
Swift also encouraged her legions of fans to register to vote, saying, “You do the polls, you make the choices, and remember, you need to be registered to vote!” She included a link run by the federal government, and the effect was immediate: visitors clicked on the link within 24 hours of Swift’s post.
Those clicks alone don’t necessarily translate into new registrations or voting, but Tom Bonnier of data firm TargetSmart says they can. “What we’ve seen is this massive increase, which we call the Swift effect,” Bonnier told “Face the Nation,” adding that data compiled since 2020 shows that about 80% of voters who register this late in the election cycle actually vote.
The day after Swift’s endorsement, Trump raged like the Wicked Witch of the West: “I hate Taylor Swift!” he shouted on Truth Social.
It was a more unpresidential move than usual for Trump, leading MSNBC to call him “the most hateful heart and mind in the history of the president.”
O’Donnell studied presidential utterances and found that the only other president to use the word “hate” so openly was George H. W. Bush, who O’Donnell intended to refer to, but was actually referring to a 2002 statement by Bush in which he expressed hatred for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Hatred is a powerful motivator, as is fear. In fact, hatred and fear are the most important arrows in Trump’s political quiver, essential to his bleak vision of an America that is crumbling and in need of a savior.
The Trump-Vance campaign’s scapegoating of legal Haitian immigrants who settled in Springfield, Ohio, may be unforgivable, but it is a natural extension of the politics of hate. Similarly, Trump has a strangely close relationship with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers, and of course supports them throughout his life.
His running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, is a prime example of how essential hatred is to Trump’s success.
“I think our people hate the right people,” Vance, who was running for Senate in 2021, told The American Conservative, perhaps intended as a witty one-liner likening Democrats to childless Catwomen, a metaphor Vance invented around the same time.
Vance’s hateful comments deeply represent the very ethos of the MAGA movement.
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s targeting of his hatred towards Swift will backfire.
But Harris’ victory
