- Former President Donald Trump’s allies have recently begun attacking the pop star Taylor Swift.
- If Trump decides to personally criticize her, he’s in for a world of trouble.
- Her US adult fan base is nearly as big as the 2020 presidential vote count and unafraid to “go low.”
If former President Donald Trump and his campaign choose to attack Taylor Swift, he’ll have to defeat a far scarier and more dangerous force than President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign: her scorned fans.
After weeks of Republican media pundits and a former presidential candidate vilifying her, going as far as saying she’s a Defense Department psy-op asset, it seems all but certain Trump will jump into the fray soon after Rolling Stone reported one of his confidants predicted a “holy war” against the pop sensation.
Should he go after her, it may be the biggest mistake of his 2024 campaign up until that point, needlessly injecting himself into negative discourse with little perceivable way of succeeding.
That is, of course, because Swift's committed fan base is just as — if not more — supportive of her as the MAGA movement is of him.
A Morning Consult survey from March estimated that 53% of US adults considered themselves Swift fans, an astoundingly large support base.
To put that into perspective, the 2020 US census found there were about 258.3 million adults in the country. If that and the aforementioned survey are correct, that means there are nearly 137 million voting-age Swift supporters across the US, or about 88% of the combined number of votes cast in the 2020 presidential election for Biden and Trump.
While the general perception is that Swift fans are overwhelmingly Democrats or left-leaning, liberals are estimated to be about 55% of her fan base, meaning there may be more than 60 million Republican Swifties that the former president risks alienating.
Sure, many of those millions of conservative fans likely won't cross the aisle in retribution for sullying Swift's name, but Biden won nine states in 2020 by fewer than 100,000 votes. If just a small fraction of Swift's Republican fans defect over such attacks, it could help Biden secure a second term in the White House.
A colleague of mine was baselessly slandered as a groomer and a pedophile, had their family doxxed, and received death threats from Swifties for the crime of simply enjoying Beyoncé's recent tour more than Swift's.
The Swifties' condemnation of that opinion, as minor as it was, highlights a major reason they're more dangerous to Trump's reelection plans than any Democratic leader in the country: While Democrats have routinely refused to "go low" instead of "high" responding to Trump's bullying, Swift fans have never held back, and they're not held to the same standards or in positions of power.
If Trump and his circle go ahead with their "holy war" against the pop star, they should be prepared for the worst.