Former President Donald Trump took a shot at pop phenom Taylor Swift over the weekend, warning she’d be “disloyal” if she failed to back him up in the 2024 election. That would be because, Trump claimed, he helped her make a lot of money.
But like a lot of things Trump says, the perplexing charge doesn’t stand up to examination.
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Trump lashed out at Swift on Sunday on his social media network, Truth Social, hours before Swift watched her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, win the Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs.
“I signed and was responsible for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and all other Musical Artists. Joe Biden didn’t do anything for Taylor, and never will. There’s no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President in the History of our Country, and be disloyal to the man who made her so much money,” Trump wrote.
For starters, Trump seems to deserve only marginal credit, at best, for the law he mentioned.
The Music Modernization Act was a law passed in 2018 and aims to update copyright issues for the music industry in the streaming era. In fairness, Trump did sign the legislation that was handed to him.
But Dina LaPolt, a key attorney involved in crafting the law, recently told Variety that Trump wasn’t involved in actually putting it together.
“This [claim] is funny to me,” LaPolt said. “Trump did nothing on our legislation except sign it, and doesn’t even know what the Music Modernization Act does. Someone should ask him what the bill actually accomplished.”
What’s more, the bill passed with nearly unanimous support in Congress. That, in theory, means the plan had enough support in Congress to even override a presidential veto if Trump had tried to shoot it down. Trump likely could have convinced a lot of Republicans in Congress to oppose the bill if he’d tried. But the broader point is that Trump hardly deserves credit for passing legislation he wasn’t involved in creating and might not have even been able to stop if he’d wanted to
In a broader sense, the “disloyal” charge also carries the implication that Swift had once been loyal to Trump before turning on him. And that’s hardly the case.
Swift broke her previous longstanding apolitical stance to speak out against Trump in 2019, writing in Elle magazine: “Invoking racism and provoking fear through thinly veiled messaging is not what I want from our leaders, and I realized that it actually is my responsibility to use my influence against that disgusting rhetoric.”
In May 2020, she took another swipe at him on his old favorite platform, the app once known as Twitter, writing “We will vote you out in November.”
Swift hasn’t made a 2024 endorsement yet. But she has caused plenty of handwringing among those on the right concerned that she may use her enormous stature to swing into action against Trump in the 2024 election. That anxiety has prompted a scramble to undermine and devalue her message before it arrives.
Some of the talk has been downright strange. FOX News prime time host Jesse Watters has gone so far as to question whether she could be a “pentagon psyop.”
That line of paranoid conjecture has even given rise to the conspiracy theory that the Super Bowl itself might be rigged to ensure that Swift’s boyfriend would win, allowing Swift (the theory goes) to then endorse Biden at the height of her powers.
President Joe Biden himself poked fun at that idea following the Kansas City win on Sunday night, posting a meme in the “Dark Brandon” genre, which features Biden with ominous glowing red eyes, and saying: “Just like we drew it all up.”
