UPDATED: Donald Trump took a break from his presidential duties to cast shade on Taylor Swift, nursing a grudge he holds against the global megastar for her endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
“Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” Trump wrote in a post Friday on his Truth Social platform. He provided no elaboration for the claim.
Swift has a current net worth of $1.6 billion, making her the wealthiest female musician in the world, according to Forbes. Swift’s 149-date Eras Tour, which concluded last December, set a new record as the music industry’s first $2 billion tour. She holds the record as the performer with the most wins in the Grammy’s album of the year category with four, and she has won a record 30 trophies at the MTV Video Music Awards. In January, Swift’s “Lover (Live From Paris)” vinyl record sold out in less than an hour.
A few hours after Trump’s presidential post regarding Swift — and a subsequent, even more insulting one about Bruce Springsteen in response to the singer’s onstage criticism about the president earlier this week — Tino Gagliardi, president of the the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, issued the following statement:
“The American Federation of Musicians will not remain silent as two of our members — Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift — are singled out and personally attacked by the President of the United States. Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift are not just brilliant musicians, they are role models and inspirations to millions of people in the United States and across the world. Whether it’s ‘Born in the USA’ or the Eras Tour, their music is timeless, impactful, and has deep cultural meaning. Musicians have the right to freedom of expression, and we stand in solidarity with all our members.”
Trump critics said the posts lashing out at the two popular artists were meant to draw attention away from controversies involving the president. “Reminder: the Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen posts are just to distract from the Qatari ‘gift’ [of a Boeing 747 jet] or the fact that he’s trying to rip Medicare and Medicaid from millions of Americans right now,” anti-Trump conservative group the Lincoln Project said on X.
In September 2024, Trump had posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” — coming days after Swift shared on Instagram that she intended to vote for Harris for U.S. president following Harris’ Sept. 10 debate victory over Trump. “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them,” Swift wrote in part in the Instagram post. “I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”
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In her post, Swift also called out Trump for previously using a fake, AI-generated image of her to make it falsely appear as if Swift were endorsing him. Trump, in an interview with Fox Business, suggested he wasn’t concerned that Swift would sue him over his posting of the fake images, saying they “were all made up by other people.”
Last October, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter, took her daughter Arabella and her friends to see Swift’s Eras Tour concert at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, according to a People magazine report.
Following Swift’s public backing of Harris, Trump claimed in an interview on Fox News “Fox & Friends” that “I was not a Taylor Swift fan” and said “she’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace.”
Trump once expressed admiration for Swift, at least for her physical appearance. “I think she’s beautiful — very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented,” he told Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh in the book “Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass.”
From Variety US