After a lot of Amid speculation about whether she will run for president in 2024, Taylor Swift chose to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris over Donald Trump on Tuesday night, when the rivals met in a largely lopsided debate. In an Instagram post that quickly racked up millions of likes, the pop star addressed the AI-generated images shared by the Republican nominee to appear to support Trump; expressed concern about the problem of misinformation; said the Harris-Waltz ticket fights for the issues she cares about; and encouraged her followers to register to vote regardless of who they support.
She concluded her post by mocking comments by Trump's running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who described Democrats as a party of “cat ladies with no kids” — by identifying herself as one of them.
The exact weight of Swift’s endorsement in the national race is hard to gauge immediately, but it was a decisive statement from an influential star with an army of active fans. And at least one of Trump’s main supporters, the ever-hungry Elon Musk, seems to have thought he could spin viral magic by responding to her with an offer of artificial insemination. “Beautiful Taylor,” Musk wrote on X, the site he owns that is still smoldering in the ruins of Twitter, “you won… I will give you a baby and guard your cats with my life.”
Musk, who has 12 known children, is locked in a custody battle with his ex-girlfriend Grimes over three of them, and has three more with an employee of his brain-chip implant company Neuralink, has long promoted a baseless panic that Western countries are headed for a “population collapse.” In 2022, he tweeted that “I’m doing my part haha” regarding human reproduction. He has also amplified claims of the “great replacement,” a conspiracy theory that falsely claims that liberals and Jews are facilitating mass illegal immigration of people of color in order to turn white Westerners into a culturally persecuted minority.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO retweeted and reacted to anti-Harris and anti-media posts on his platform during Tuesday night’s debate and in the hours afterward, while doing little in the way of praise for Trump. Still, he seemed amused by the idea that the election might come down to loyalty to him or Swift. In response to a tweet from an account declaring, “Oh my god, this is really an Elon vs. Taylor Swift election now,” he posted his favorite emoji, a crying laughing face. An hour later, Musk, whose recreational drug use and sometimes erratic behavior have alarmed leadership at his companies, tweeted about impregnating Swift and protecting her cats.
An hour later, the photo had garnered nearly 50,000 likes, along with nearly 10,000 responses, ranging from disgust to approval. Neither Swift nor her boyfriend, American football star and three-time Super Bowl winner Travis Kelce, responded to the call.
