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The last three words of Taylor Swift’s latest Instagram post were the funniest. After yesterday’s presidential debate, a new picture appeared on her feed, which has 283 million followers. Swift was holding her cat Benjamin Button and the message was captioned: “Taylor Swift, childless cat lady.” From that alone, 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 “quiet, gifted leader” and praised her running mate Tim Walz, who she said has “advocated for LGBTQ rights, IVF and women’s rights to their own bodies for decades.”
The caption made no mention of Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance – and it didn’t need to. Anyone who follows politics knows that Vance has repeatedly claimed that childless women are “miserable” and that people who aren’t parents have no “personal and direct interest” in America’s future. In a 2021 interview with Fox News, he summed up his views with one memorable line: The country is run by a “bunch of childless cat ladies.”
Swift’s reaction — she ironically applies the label to herself, a successful pop star with a huge fan base, a billion-dollar net worth, and a handsome football player boyfriend — suggests she may be the last living representative of the Obama-era ideal of maintaining class in the face of provocation. Remember “When they go low, we go high”? Very 2016. The Democratic National Convention in August showed that the party has given up on turning a blind eye to Trump’s excesses and is instead making sharp remarks in return: the high and low point was when Senator Elizabeth Warren, 75, made a couch joke. Even Barack Obama slyly pointed out the small size of Trump’s… crowds. (The Democrats liked that joke so much they made an ad out of it.)
Swift’s statements of support, by contrast, were incredibly restrained. She spoke out in favor of the Democrats’ political platform on the issues that mattered to her, mentioned Trump’s “chaos” only in passing, and recommended that her fans register to vote, do their own research, and make their own decisions. This was not a thunderous condemnation of Trump as an acute threat to democracy. Nor did she use any of the language popular on left-leaning online sites in the late 2010s and 2020s, where writers agonized over whether to stay friends with Republican voters or talk to their Trump-supporting uncle on Thanksgiving. Swift’s statement simply outlined her own decision and acknowledged that other people might make a different decision.
This is more radical than it may seem – because Swift will face criticism from both sides. Mainstream Democrats are naturally delighted: when Walz received the news live on MSNBC, he clenched his fist in gratitude over his heart. But some of her most ardent fans will find the support lukewarm and her criticism of Trump and Vance too muted. Many on the left will be angry that she didn’t mention Gaza. The internet right, meanwhile, will probably lose their minds that this support even exists.
Because Swift is such a big star who has written so personally about her life, some of her fans feel like she is a slave to them. She recently faced criticism for hugging Brittany Mahomes, the wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, while they were attending the US Open. (Brittany Mahomes has liked pro-Trump posts on Instagram.) The usual Swiftie Kremlinology spread across social media: Did Swift look like she was in the hug or did she do it reluctantly? Did she avoid Mahomes for the rest of the game? And why were they sitting in separate suites at the Chiefs game the week before? Maybe Swift hates and rejects her after all! But the simplest explanation is probably the right one: Swift gets along well with her boyfriend’s teammate and his wife despite their different political views. That used to be perfectly normal. Maybe Swift would like it to be normal again.
On the right, the initial response to the endorsement shows once again that Swift’s superpower — aside from writing catchy lyrics about heartbreak — is exposing her critics as weirdos. Within hours of her endorsement on Instagram, Elon Musk had made his thoughts known on X: “Fine, Taylor… you won… I will give you a child and protect your cats with my life.” Why Swift would want one of Musk’s twelve children is completely unclear. Oh, wait — I hear in my earpiece that Musk offered Swift his sperm. See what I mean? Musk could have easily contradicted her, but instead he got creepy in a public forum. Another one for the “weird” file.
Of course, Trump himself will be disappointed by Swift’s support for Harris: After she endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, Trump joked that he liked her music “about 25 percent less now.” According to a recent book about his old show The ApprenticeHe described Swift as “unusually beautiful” and asked in an interview, “Is she liberal, or is that just an act?” He seems genuinely confused that someone can start playing country music and not vote Republican.
If the former president is upset, he only has 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 blonde women holding signs supporting him. Trump’s caption read, “I accept!” — which might read like a joke if his entire campaign strategy wasn’t aimed at blurring the line between fact and fiction. Witness how both Trump and Vance seized on a fake news story about Haitians eating cats that Vance tried to mentally portray as true because immigration was a problem, even if it was, well, not 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 very different approach. “The easiest way to combat misinformation,” she wrote, “is with the truth.”
The support inevitably made me think of the key scene in Netflix’s Miss Americaan authorized documentary about Swift that shows her father, Scott, warning her against supporting a Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2018. Swift had spoken about how she was encouraged to stay out of politics as a country artist, especially after fans and the music industry punished the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks) for their criticism of George W. Bush and the Iraq War. In the scene, Scott Swift expresses concerns about her personal safety because she has already been stalked, and he also leans into Michael Jordan’s famous phrase that “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” But she presses on anyway. Today, the stakes are even higher. Swift is now at the helm of one of the biggest brands in the American entertainment industry — and, through her boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the NFL Chiefs, she has close ties to another. That support comes with professional and personal risks.
What’s striking about her statement, however, is not that a 34-year-old childless woman would support the Democrats – demographically, that makes perfect sense. What’s most interesting is her tone. Harris has largely abandoned Biden’s strategy of warning about Trump’s threat to democracy and instead run an old-fashioned campaign on values and competence. Similarly, Swift has subtly condemned the Republican platform and moderately supported the Democrats. And, of course, that one pointed dig on behalf of childless cat ladies everywhere.
