Politics tamfitronics
If you need proof that Taylor Swift has changed her ways, look no further than the contrast between the past few days and her behavior circa 2016. Amid rampant speculation about her relationship, friendships, and political views, Swift spent the weekend having fun in public.
On Thursday, Swift was in her now-customary VIP box at boyfriend Travis Kelce’s regular season opener with the Kansas City Chiefs. On Friday the couple dined out at Lucali in Brooklyn. Come Saturday, the two attended supermodel Karen Elson and Electric Lady Studios owner Lee Foster’s wedding (in an off-white Zimmerman dress, no less), and on Sunday, Swift and Kelce headed to Queens for the U.S. Open, where they were anything but inconspicuous. Swift, in a red and white linen dress from Reformation, sang and danced with a Gucci-clad Kelce, and even caught up with fellow NFL WAG Brittany Mahomes for a quick, headline-generating hug. Swift, who is famously adept at staying out of the spotlight when she wants to, is defiantly living her life, having a good time where all of us can see it.
This is especially notable when you consider what she’s said in the past about feeling like she needed to go dark in response to public criticism. In her 2020 Netflix doc, Miss Americanashe described her 2016 disappearing act like this: “Nobody physically saw me for a year. That’s what I thought they wanted,” she said. “I had to deconstruct an entire belief system, toss it out, and reject it. It woke me up from constantly feeling I was fighting for people’s respect. It was happiness without anyone else’s input.”
Much was made of Swift sitting separately from Brittany Mahomes at Arrowhead Stadium on Thursday, opting instead to root for the home team alongside Kelce’s parents, just as Brittany has come under fire for her political views: She apparently liked and then unliked an Instagram post from Donald Trump. The Republican presidential nominee took notice and thanked Brittany for her “support” in a recent social media post.
Swift has spoken out against Trump in the past, endorsing Joe Biden in 2020 while accusing Trump of “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency,” but has not voiced a stance on the 2024 election. Patrick Mahomes has declared himself the Switzerland of America, announcing that he will not publicly endorse a candidate but instead generally encourage people to vote. Brittany, apart from her liking and unliking and subsequent vague tweet pleas for everyone to just be nice, hasn’t issued a statement.
A source familiar with the pair’s friendship noted to Vanity Fair that people can have different political ideas or beliefs and still be friends.
Taylor Swift, Brittany Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and Patrick Mahomes at the 2024 US Open.MediaPunch/Bauer-Griffin
It’s not unlike when Kelce and Mahomes’s teammate, Harrison Butkerdelivered a commencement address last spring, in which he called Pride Month a “deadly sin” and shared his opinion that women’s greatest achievements were at home and with their families, rather than in the workplace. On New Heightsthe podcast he co-hosts with brother Jason KelceTravis said that Butker was a great teammate, and of the speech, “I can’t say I agree with the majority of it or just about any of it outside of just him loving his family and his kids and I don’t think that I should judge him by his views, especially his religious views, of how to go about life. That’s just not who I am.”
While Swift, Kelce, and the Mahomeses have remained tight-lipped on who will get their vote, Trump has been more than happy to sound off about each of them: He recently shared AI-generated images implying that Swift had endorsed him, and mirrored his past comments that Swift was “unusually beautiful” in a recent social media post thanking the Mahomeses for their “support,” mentioning what he thought of Brittany’s appearance (“beautiful”) before her actual name. Asked by Vanity Fair to specify what support, exactly, Trump was thanking the couple for in the post, a spokesperson for Trump did his best impression of an ouroboros and said, “I’d point you to President Trump’s post on Truth Social.” Earlier this year, Trump even had something to say about Kelce, posting on social media that “I like [Taylor’s] boyfriend, Travis, even though he may be a Liberal, and probably can’t stand me!”
But as Swift once again finds herself at the center of gossip, just like in 2016 at the height of her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye Westwhen she tried to exclude herself from the narrative by disappearing as best she could, the older and wiser Swift is making a different choice: She’s living her life. As she and Kelce mugged and enthusiastically sang The Darkness’s “I Believe In a Thing Called Love” to one another in the stands on Sunday at the Open, the sentiment couldn’t have been clearer. As Swift herself once said, haters gonna hate. It’s just that she’s now taking her own advice and shaking it off.
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