Last month, on Truth Social, former President Trump reposted a collage of young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts. Most of the images clearly appeared to be generated by artificial intelligence.
“I do!” Trump told his 7.1 million followers, prompting the world’s most famous childless cat lady to approach him with claws outstretched.
Opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
“I recently learned that an AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy was posted on your site,” Taylor Swift wrote on Instagram just after Vice President Kamala Harris passed the buck to Trump in their first and likely only debate. “It really evoked my fears around AI and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It led me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The easiest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”
And so, she wrote, she will vote for Harris for president and signed her post as “The Childless Cat Lady.”
“I think she’s a talented and steady leader, and I think we can accomplish so much more in this country if we’re guided by calm and not chaos,” Swift told her 284 million followers.
I don’t know how many of them are American voters, but it only takes a small fraction of that number to change the outcome in a battleground state. In 2020, for example, Wisconsin voters elected President Biden over then-President Trump by 20,682 votes. In Georgia, the difference was even smaller. Biden won the state by 11,779 votes, prompting Trump’s infamous and arguably illegal request to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 more votes. But I digress.
Swift also urged her legions of followers to register to vote, telling them, “Your research is all yours and the choice is yours… Remember to vote, you have to be registered!” She posted a link to a federally operated voter registration site and the effect was immediate. More than 405,000 visitors clicked on the link in the 24 hours after Swift posted.
Those clicks alone don’t necessarily translate into new registrations or votes. But Tom Bonier of the data firm TargetSmart said they could. “What we saw was this massive surge — we call it now the Swift Effect,” Bonier said last week on “Face the Nation.” And, he added, based on data collected since 2020, about 80% of voters who register this late in the election cycle actually end up voting.
A day after Swift's endorsement, Trump broke down like the Wicked Witch of the West. “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” he screamed on Truth Social.
That seemed even less presidential than Trump's usual outburst. The outburst prompted MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell to declare that he “has the most hateful mind and spirit in presidential history.”
O'Donnell researched presidential statements and could find only one other president who used the word “hate” so publicly: George H.W. Bush. I thought O'Donnell was going to mention Bush's famous dislike of broccoli, but he was referring to Bush's 2002 hate speech against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
The thing about hate is that, like fear, it is a powerful motivator. Hatred and fear, in fact, are the most important arrows in Trump’s political arsenal, integral to his dark vision of an America that is falling apart and in need of a savior.
The Trump-Vance campaign has scapegoated legal immigrants from Haiti who have settled in Springfield, Ohio, a natural, if inexcusable, extension of the politics of hate. So has their strange, close relationship with the eccentric racist Islamophobe Laura Loomer and, of course, their continued support for the white nationalists and Holocaust deniers who hang around Mar-a-Lago.
His choice for vice president, Ohio Senator JD Vance, is an example of how hate is integral to Trump's success.
“I think our people hate the right people,” Vance said in an interview with the American Conservative newspaper in 2021, when he was seeking a Senate seat. Perhaps it was meant to be a throwaway one-liner, along the lines of comparing Democrats to childless women who take care of cats, a cliché Vance invented around the same time.
In a profound way, Vance's hateful comment distills the very spirit of the MAGA movement.
It's too early to tell whether Trump's hate speech against Swift will have negative consequences.
But how wonderful would it be if a Harris victory came with little cat ducks?
@robinkabcarian
