D onald Trump would like his followers to believe that pop music megastar Taylor Swift advocates voting red. But that may just be in his wildest dreams.
“I accept!” the former President posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday, along with a collage of images from the internet—including some apparently generated by artificial intelligence—showing the TIME Person of the Year dressed as Uncle Sam and saying “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump” as well as numerous Swift fans expressing their support for the Republican presidential nominee.
Taylor Swift has not officially endorsed any candidate in the 2024 election, though she previously backed the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020 and has criticized Trump for “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism” and for defunding the U.S. Postal Service in 2020 , which she described as choosing to “blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power.”
TIME has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on a potential Swift endorsement, as the Democratic Party kicks off its convention this week in Chicago, where a number of celebrities are expected to speak and perform in support of the Harris-Walz campaign.
Read More: Your Questions About the Democratic National Convention, Answered
At least one so-called “Swiftie for Trump”—pictured twice in Trump’s post—is real. According to Wisconsin Right Now , 19-year-old Jenna Piwowarczyk was seen sporting the slogan on a homemade white T-shirt at a Trump rally in Wisconsin in June.
But there’s no evidence that a significant number of fans of Swift are supporting the Republican candidate—an unofficial Swifties for Trump account on X (created in July) has less than 4,000 followers, while an unofficial Swifties 4 Kamala account, also created in July, has over 60,000 followers on X and over 100,000 on TikTok .
Read More: The Kamala Harris Campaign Is Embracing the Memes
Trump’s Truth Social post also included a screenshot of a post by conservative account Amuse, featuring clearly AI-generated images of young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, accompanied by a headline, labeled as “satire,” that says Swiftes are “turning to Trump” after the singer’s Vienna concert was canceled out of concern over a jihadist terrorist plot. The original post on X acknowledges in its image alt. text: “There is no Swifties For Trump movement - but there should be.”
In another Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump reshared a TikTok video of a woman claiming that Swifties were now “rallying for Trump” because of the same terrorist plot.
Trump has spoken about Swift before, telling Ramin Setoodeh, author of Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass , “I hear she’s very talented” and “I think she’s very, I think she’s very beautiful, actually—unusually beautiful.” As for Swift’s politics, Trump is quoted in the same book as saying, “I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump”—though he expressed some skepticism about that, reportedly questioning: “She’s legitimately liberal? It’s not an act? It surprises me that a country star can be successful being liberal.”
As experts warn of the dangers of disinformation in politics , which new technology can exacerbate, Trump’s recent sharing of the Swift-related AI-generated images comes after he and billionaire Elon Musk shared an AI-altered video on X last week depicting them dancing after the two held a high-profile livestream together on the social media platform owned by Musk.
Contact us at letters@time.com .
Most Popular
Comments / 0