On Friday morning Donald Trump responded to the ongoing protests demanding the arrest of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the three other officers involved by condemning the protesters and invoking the prospect of violent retaliation. “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
A few hours later Taylor Swift responded to Trump by tweeting, “After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’??? We will vote you out in November.”
A pop figure’s condemnation of the president’s casual threat of violence against protesters is generally not the stuff of breaking news, but it is of particular note here. Swift famously stayed silent throughout the 2016 election, a move that led to all manner of projection from across the political spectrum on social media. She told Vogue last year that she chose not to endorse a candidate because “I knew I wasn’t going to help.”
Her relationship to politics has been so scrutinized that her eventual decision to endorse Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections in Tennessee constituted a primary thread of the recent documentary Miss Americana. As the film showed, she came to that decision only after a series of back-and-forths with her family and publicist. This one seems to have come much more quickly.
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