By breakfast time, Swift’s Instagram post, featuring a shot from her TIME Person of the Year shoot of her cuddling up to the one and only Benjamin Button (the cat, not Brad Pitt in prosthetics), had racked up more than 8.7 million likes and counting. Conservatives had also had time to have their say, including Elon Musk tweeting an aggressively creepy “offer” to “give you a child and guard your cats with my life,” which, ew, and Trump calling in to Fox & Friends Wednesday to basically paraphrase the bridge from “We Are Never Getting Back Together” and saying he always liked Brittany Mahomes better than Taylor anyway, so there. He doesn’t even want her endorsement, ok? Even though he has said multiple times in the past that he did, and even used AI-generated images to pretend that she endorsed him, he doesn’t. Nyah nyah, etc and so forth.
“Well, I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said when asked about Swift having her say. “She’s a big Trump fan. I was not a Taylor Swift fan. It was only a matter of time. You couldn’t possibly endorse Biden. But she’s a very liberal person. She seems to always endorse a Democrat and she’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace. But I like Brittany. Brittany is great. She’s the one I like much better than Taylor Swift. Wife of the great quarterback. I think she’s terrific.”
Representatives for Brittany Mahomes did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.
The Swifties for Kamala political organizing group, which is not officially affiliated with Swift and has said they did not feel they needed to wait for an official endorsement from Swift to get moving, predicted in a press release that “that impact is only going to grow thanks to Taylor’s endorsement.” Co-founder and executive director Irene Kim said, “We knew she would speak when the time was right and are so excited to keep up the fight.”
The group said it has more than 3,500 active volunteers, and has raised more than $158,000 for Harris’s campaign. The group’s kickoff call featured speakers such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, with music icon Carole King performing an impromptu snippet of Swift’s “Shake It Off.”
Baby, let the games begin, indeed.