It’s a twist befitting this incredibly stupid moment in American history: Just over a week after Donald Trump tried to claim that Kamala Harris was boosting her rally crowd sizes with AI-generated images, the former president appears to now have fallen victim to a set of AI-generated images purporting to show a budding movement of Taylor Swift fans backing his campaign.
On Truth Social yesterday, Trump shared a collage of screen grabs and photos of the so-called “Swifties for Trump” movement. Admittedly, two of the images were legit, showing Trump supporter Jenna Piwowarczyk wearing a “Swifties for Trump” shirt at a recent rally in Wisconsin.
The others, though, sure looked AI-generated. Obviouly the one of Swift dressed as Uncle Sam with the caption, “Taylor Wants You to Vote for Donald Trump,” was fake. And another purported to show a bunch of young women marching in their matching “Swifties for Trump” shirts. That one appears to have been created by a pretty popular conservative meme account and is clearly labeled “satire.”
Nevertheless, Trump seemed to take it all at face value, captioning the collage with a vigorous, “I accept!” This raises the incredibly hilarious— and totally believable — possibility that Trump thinks he’s actually secured Swift’s endorsement.
(To be fair to Trump, him thinking that is honestly no less stupid than other people thinking last week that a photo Swift was “soft launching” an endorsement of Harris with an Eras Tour photo that happened to show a backup dancer wearing a suit costume.)
But while AI may have tricked Trump, it does appear like some corners of the conservative web are trying to actually get “Swifties for Trump” off the ground — though it all reeks of trying to “make fetch happen” desperation. There’s Piwowarczyk and her aforementioned “Swifties for Trump” shirt, as well as a video shared by conservative content creator Kandis Esposito (and posted on Truth Social by Trump), in which Esposito lays out the general narrative being pushed to make this movement seem more real than it probably is.
“I guess something with ISIS happened, there’s al to of terrorism going on, and I guess she [Swift] had to shut down some shows because of that,” Esposito said. “And a lot of them are just saying, ‘You know, if Trump was in office, this would’ve never, ever happened.’”
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Ostensibly, Esposito is alluding to the thwarted terror plot that led Swift to cancel her shows in Vienna, Austria. Which, by the way, is not in the United States, so even if Trump were in office, he probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it — and besides, Austrian authorities seemed to have handled the situation pretty well.
Anyway, as the case has been for all of 2024, Taylor Swift has not endorsed anyone for president. She did endorse Joe Biden and Harris in 2020 and has spoken out against Trump.
