Swift 2020

Taylor Swift Will “Do Everything I Can” to End Donald Trump’s Autocracy

The “Lover” songwriter regrets sitting out the 2016 election, and is tired of Donald Trump “gaslighting the American public.”
Taylor Swift in front of a mural introducing her latest album in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.
Gotham/Getty Images.

No longer content with being excluded from the narrative, Taylor Swift is taking on Washington—or, at least the autocratic leader blithely scream-tweeting commands from its most famous house. “We’re a democracy – at least, we’re supposed to be – where you’re allowed to disagree, dissent, debate,” Swift told The Guardian of Donald Trump, and her intent to get more political in 2020. “I really think that he thinks this is an autocracy.”

Of course, Swift’s opposition to the Trump White House is no secret—she’s spoken out on a range of LGBTQ+ issues over the last few years, and openly admitted some regret with not publicly endorsing a candidate in 2016—Hillary Clinton, she confirms. “I was just trying to protect my mental health – not read the news very much, go cast my vote, tell people to vote,” she acknowledged. A cancer relapse for her mother, Andrea Swift, was reportedly weighing on her, among a range of other issues. “I just knew what I could handle and I knew what I couldn’t. I was literally about to break.”

Swift believed her public image would have made her something of “a hindrance,” but she’s gotten past that. In the interview she draws particular attention to a Republican-led effort to ban abortion in Tennessee by way of a bill that redefines fetal viability, which Swift vowed to fight. “Obviously, I’m pro-choice,” she said. She claimed her intent to “do everything I can for 2020,” adding “I just can’t believe this is happening.”

Back in June, Swift also published an open Instagram letter to Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander calling for U.S. Senate passage of the Equality Act, which would “protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in their places of work, homes, schools, and other public accommodations.” The letter also contained her first major rebuke of Donald Trump, adding “I personally reject the President’s stance that his administration ‘supports equal treatment of all.’”

This time around, Swift seems more open to calling out the administration and its leader. She accused Trump of “gaslighting the American public into being like, ‘If you hate the president, you hate America.’”