Trump conspiracists use Taylor Swift to gain MAGA attention, followers, TV ratings
Those peddling the theory that the pop star’s relationship with American footballer Travis Kelce is a deep-state plot don’t believe it but know people will lap it up.
AS stories about rock stars go it will never be up there with Paul McCartney’s bare feet on the cover of Abbey Road or Elvis Presley being spotted in a diner in Alabama a decade after his death but if the conspiracy theorists are right this one will be much more consequential.
You will probably know by now that for the past six months Taylor Swift, the most successful pop star on the planet, has been dating an American footballer. Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs plays tight end, a position that in the game of violent chess that is America’s top sport almost uniquely combines the two required qualities of sheer heft and protean skill – a human giant whose job it is to both physically manhandle opponents so they can’t get to his own team’s quarterback and then run down the field and make acrobatic catches.
Kelce is on track to be probably the greatest to play the position and next week his team are going to the Super Bowl, for the fourth time in five years.
As a football fan who also happens to like Swift, I will confess I find the attention the relationship has attracted annoying.
Taylor “swag surfin’ ” (look it up) at Chiefs games. Taylor showing up in a specially tailored jacket with Kelce’s number on it. Teenage Swifties, whose previous brush with football was walking past the high-school team doing warm-ups in the gym, now earnestly discussing the relative merits of cover-two defences and the tuck rule.
But heck. Entertainer-sports star match-ups are part of the culture: Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, David and Victoria Beckham, Anna Kournikova and Enrique Iglesias. And for a 34-year-old woman who’s made a career out of singing songs about unsuitable boyfriends, it feels good.
But this is not a Taylor Swift lyric about long lists of ex-lovers or teardrops on guitars. This is America 2024, so of course, like beer and Mickey Mouse, it has to be all about politics, and specifically, how one side is trying to cheat at it.
According to some on the right, the entire relationship is a deep-state operation to help Joe Biden to get re-elected, a psyop to herd the sheeple back into their pens. The idea is that Swift, who publicly backed Joe Biden in 2020 and has some predictable – if, for a celebrity, relatively understated – views about politics, and Kelce, whose off-field game has included promoting Covid-19 vaccines, are the frontwoman and man for an elaborate plot by the corporate-entertainment-government complex.
The theory holds that the relationship was concocted in some deal between the National Football League and Biden campaign, and the whole NFL season was then rigged so the Chiefs would advance to the Super Bowl, triumph there, and in the glow that America would feel afterwards, Swift and Kelce would issue their joint endorsement of the president, sinking with a stolen kiss the hopes of Donald Trump.
This is not just the normal – I use the term carefully – insanity from a fringe crowd that hears messages from the afterlife. It’s close to mainstream thinking in the dominant strand of the Republican Party. Prominent MAGA voices on television and online have elaborated on it. Vivek Ramaswamy, the former tech entrepreneur who ran for the party nomination and is now angling to be Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, captured it in a posting on X. “I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl,” he asked sarcastically. “And I wonder if there’s a presidential endorsement coming from an artificially propped-up couple.”
It is not worth wasting too much of the reader’s time debunking the “theory”. Let’s just say it’s not simply the number of people with no obvious political motive who would have to be involved that makes it implausible, but the number of professional sportsmen who would have to willingly sacrifice their lifelong chance at glory, all for the sake of perhaps very marginally improving the Democrat’s chance of victory. Nor is there much point in reflecting once again on the enduring appeal of conspiracy theories in American politics.
The point I think is what this reveals about how politics has become in large part a racket, an extended and ambitious grift for utterly unprincipled charlatans. Don’t for a second believe that Ramaswamy or any of the social media and cable news celebrities pushing this idea believe any of it. They know instead that there are enough people out there who want to hear it. So they give it to them and in return get attention, followers, TV ratings.
This is not at all confined to the right, by the way, though most of the media only ever focuses on their conspiracy theorising. It’s universal. In a political culture now defined by grievance and victimhood, people of all political ideologies believe there are powerful dark forces out there constantly thwarting their hopes and ambitions, plotting to destroy their vision of what the world should be.
You can get far more attention playing to those grievances by promoting insane ideas about rock stars or foreign leaders than you can ever gain by making a case for your ideas. In the age of digital ubiquity, social media reach and the political silos that our online world has created, it’s so much easier and more profitable. Famous people with large platforms who not only don’t believe most of what they peddle but actually have contempt for the intelligence of their audiences get successful and rich by feeding them pap.
“January 6 was a psyop by the deep state! Subscribe to my podcast!”
“Donald Trump is a Russian asset! Watch my online show!”
“All white people are evil oppressors! Sign up for my Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training module.”
Swift captured the cynicism herself better than any of them a few years ago: I’ve got a blank space, baby. And I’ll write your name.
The Times
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