Trump has now posted on Twitter that playground of AI bots and Russian trollski now called “X” that “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
Why would Trump do this? If you think that he is just being Trump, i.e., totally stupid, and that he went out of his way to alienate Swift’s many fans …. well …. you would be wrong.
This is classic Trump doing what he does best: Deflecting. By creating a bigger firestorm about Taylor Swift, Trump is trying to (1) take the news away from his Springfield fiasco which is killing him with non-MAGA voters, and (2) bring the news cycle back to him. In this analysis, Trump is probably thinking that the Swifties aren’t going to vote for him anyway so it doesn’t do that much harm to diss her.
Whatever else you want to say about Trump, he is a Zen Master at changing the narrative and regaining the media cycle, even if it is about horrible news that he himself has caused.
Why does Trump want to move on so badly from Springfield? The only thing that Trump really has going for him is immigration. His (and Vance’s) wild and utterly false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets and the park geese demonstrate that his immigration schtick is based on things that don’t actually happen. Springfield also reminds voters of the daily chaos of 2016-2020 and that bomb threats and civil unrest are baggage that Trump carries with him. This is so bad, and persisting on the front pages of newspapers throughout the electorate, that Trump absolutely has to get Americans to forget about that story and move on to the next. So, Trump himself creates the next story by dissing on Taylor Swift.
Will it work? What passes these days for the news media will very likely fall for it. Which means that the rest of us need to ignore the Taylor Swift insult (she is fully capable of taking care of herself) and keep bringing folks back to Trump’s Springfield insanity.