Pop superstar Taylor Swift has explained her decision not to endorse Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, arguing that Donald Trump was successfully weaponizing the concept of “celebrity endorsements” and would portray the pair as “the two nasty women.”
In a lengthy interview with Vogue, Swift admitted that she did not believe her endorsement would help Hillary’s campaign, despite widespread pressure on her to do so.
“Unfortunately in the 2016 election, you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help,” she explained. “Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary.
“Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”
Swift decided to break her political silence last year when she provided a hackneyed endorsed Democratic candidate Phil Bredesen over Republican Marsha Blackburn in last year’s midterm Senate election. The singer also decried America’s “systematic racism” against people of color and smeared Blackburn as “not be willing to fight for dignity for ALL Americans, no matter their skin color, gender or who they love.”
In her announcement, the singer also expressed her support for LGBT rights and other progressive agendas. She explained that having once been reluctant to publicly discuss politics “several events in my life and in the world in the past two years” had made her “feel very differently about that now.”
One of those events is likely referred to in the Vogue interview, where she describes her shock after fellow artist Todrick Hall asked her what she would do if her son were gay.
“The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she said. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking. It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”
The 29-year-old singer also explained that she had become more interested in LGBT rights as “rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male.”
“I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of,” she continued. “It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”
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