Of Taylor and Trump

What we see in the light of our brightest political and poetic stars

Of all the stars in our cultural constellation, none gleam so brightly as Donald Trump and Taylor Swift. These twin flames of political and poetic power soar above all others. The light they cast reveals important truths about our contemporary order.

If you want to understand modern America, you need to understand Donald Trump and you need to understand Taylor Swift.

Many on the Right have no problem with the former task. Those of us who gravitated to Trump when he first ran for President did so based on instinct and reason. Trump represented a turn toward greatness and national renewal in a moment of decline and stagnation.

Understanding Taylor Swift poses a harder challenge for conservatives. To many, the underlying unity between her artistry and Donald Trump’s rise is not obvious. To even more, such a connection seems utterly preposterous in light of Swift’s political opposition to MAGA.

Swift’s songs are, in the common view, about boy problems and eye-rolling teenage girl emotional angst. In the eyes of many conservatives, she is vapid at best and another crazed liberal celebrity working against President Trump at worst. As Taylor has jutted more prominently into public view—thanks to her relationship with Travis Kelce, the Super Bowl, her Grammy wins, new album, and record-shattering world tour—this latter view has become increasingly common.

The attacks have mounted. On a podcast addressing Swift, conservative influencer Charlie Kirk questioned her fertility and marriageableness by asking how many eggs she has left. A co-host implied that she might actually be a transgender who never had any eggs to begin with. Another called her nasty and said “no one liked her.” Jack Posobiec believes that Biden will use Taylor Swift as a means to rig the election.

Taylor is Transgender?

These attacks on Swift are misplaced. First, there is absolutely nothing Taylor Swift could do to save Joe Biden from himself. Her endorsement won’t reverse Biden’s dementia. It certainly won’t reverse the economic damage he’s done or the flood of illegal immigrants his administration let into the country.

Taylor Swift is not a “get out of jail free” card for Democrats. Every other celebrity of any note has already slobbered all over the DNC. Adding one more to the mix, no matter how popular, won’t change that dynamic. 

The idea that Swift is a “Pentagon asset” engaged in a high-IQ, high-stakes conspiracy against Trump gives too much credit to the Pentagon’s abilities and to Swift’s political influence.  

In addressing Swift’s politics, the American right would be wise to follow Donald Trump.

Trump himself had the perfect response to Swift coming out as a Democrat in 2018. With a wry smile on his face, he responded to a reporter asking for his take on the matter, casually remarking that Swift didn’t know what she was talking about and then followed up by saying that he liked “her music 25% less now.” Trump gave Swift’s non-endorsement exactly what it deserved—a 35 second soundbite that amusingly dismissed her political judgment without needlessly antagonizing Swift or her fans. 

The conservative attacks on Swift’s looks and music are more baffling. They betray a lack of insight and perception into our cultural situation by influencers on the Right. Taylor Swift is popular enough and prolific enough to demand a more serious analysis than what has been offered so far.

Taylor Swift is not a tranny. That might sound obvious, but it is a point worth hammering home: No tranny is ever going to make even marginally compelling art about love. No one who hates nature and their own body is going to have anything moving to say about romance. For transgenders, ideology and “gender” replace sex and love as the focal point of their relational lives. The very existence of Swift’s discography and its subject matter make it impossible to believe that she is anything other than a woman.

The idea that Swift is ugly and unpopular is also bizarre. I remember an acquaintance of mine railing against Trump in 2016, He insisted that Trump was a failure at business and utterly charmless. This young man, mind you, was tens of thousands of dollars in student debt from a college education where he’d managed a B-average. I took his tirade with more than a grain of salt.

I feel the same way when I hear the more intense attacks on Taylor Swift. The simple reality is that there is a great mass of people, including men of taste, who think that this tall, slender, blonde-haired, blue-eyed singer with clear skin was (and still is, in some way) a beauty.

Beauty, of course, is not the same as goodness. Someone can appear differently than they are. Just because someone hates Trump’s policies, doesn’t mean that Trump has no virtues as a businessman and public speaker. Just because a critic finds Swift unattractive and her politics repulsive, doesn’t mean she’s unpopular or that she has no charm.

It is important to remember that Taylor’s critics cannot do what she does. Charlie Kirk will never sell out dozens of stadiums so millions of adoring fans can hear his words. Jack Posobiec will never produce art that stirs the hearts of an entire generation of young women. I don’t say that to dog either man. I, too, lack such talents.

But that very deficiency should give us pause. Taylor Swift has abilities that we do not. She says things we can’t to an audience we don’t have. Swift, therefore, has something to teach us either about her art or about the conditions that make her art possible.

And what is that lesson? What is it that we see in the light cast by pop culture’s biggest star?

Pain.

Taylor as Teacher

Taylor Swift, more than any other popular artist in our time, captures the ugly effects of the sexual revolution. She is a window into the contemporary female heart, and, by extension, our cultural zeitgeist. In her work we experience a distillation and clarification of the chaotic and turbulent reality confronting young people, women especially, in a world unbounded from life-affirming order and the boundaries that used to guide private life.

If Swift were just a girl turning diary entries about boys and teenage problems into songs, her star would have died out a long time ago. Lots of girls have feelings. Very few have anything interesting to say about them. Swift possesses a deeper and richer sense of the movements of the heart than her contemporaries. She is broader, too, in her artistic and emotional reach.

In her work, Swift returns again and again to themes of loss, heartbreak, time, memory, regret, and longing. At her most profound and mature, Swift paints these human problems in “screaming color.” Her work, far from being frivolous, deals with serious and important topics.

This is not to say that Swift’s art has no problems. It does. But in order to see them truthfully, we need to treat her work with the care and focus it deserves.

Before diving in to her work, it is worth comparing Swift to her peers. There are plenty of musicians today who could very well might be psychological operations against the American people. I believe rappers like Ice Spice, Megan the Stallion, and Sexxy Redd more than qualify as auditory terrorists, sent to assault our eardrums and sense of decency.

Ice Spice, in her most recent hit single that debuted at number 37 on the Billboard Hot 100, raps to an unnamed hater: “Think you the shit, bitch?/ You not even the fart (grah)”

I guess Shakespeare isn’t dead, after all.

Cardi B is an even greater wit. She is the mind and voice behind the song, “Wet Ass Pussy” which topped out at number one on the Billboard Global 200. The song starts with a background singer claiming there are “some whores in this house” before Cardi B launches into an X-rated depiction of her bedroom activities. At one point, she tells her man to “swipe his nose like a credit card” in her vagina. This comes in between accounts of her describing her lover’s ideal penis (“Mack truck” that is so large it “leans”) and how she likes oral sex (she requests that her lover touch her uvula, “the little dangly thing” at the “back of the throat,” with his genitalia). 

Sexxy Red is the songstress behind the hit “Poundtown” in which she rhapsodizes about the following:

My coochie pink, my booty hole brown

Where the ni**as? I'm looking for the hoes

Quit playin', ni**a, come suck a bitch toes

Modern pop artists dwell largely on man’s lower organs and impulses. Theirs is music concerned with man’s stomach and his genitals. Swift, by contrast, sings about the heart.

It is worth remembering that Swift rose to prominence outside the normal paths. She is not a product of the Disney channel, American Idol, or a major record label swooping down to snatch her up. Though she had some help from her moderately wealthy parents, Swift’s success is predominantly a product of her unwavering and ferocious ambition.

At the age of 11, Swift convinced her mother to take her to Nashville to try and pitch her music to record labels. At 14, she convinced both parents to move there permanently so that she could try and make it as an artist. Though she received some minor recognition by bigger labels for her songwriting abilities, she was only signed to a development deal by RCA records instead of the actual production contract she was looking for. In 2004, however, she was noticed by Scott Borchetta, a music industry promoter looking to start his own label. He saw Taylor playing in a coffee shop and told her that, though he had no funding, he would be willing to sign her when he did. Borchetta managed to secure Toby Keith as a backer for his label and facilitated a meeting between Keith and Swift.

There is, however, an additional element in all this. Though Borchetta would likely deny the claims if asked, it is likely that he was willing to sign Swift in large part because her father was willing to plunk down a more than $100,000 investment into Borchetta’s label, Big Machine Records. Regardless, it was the business deal of a lifetime. Taylor Swift singlehandedly turned Big Machine into a Nashville powerhouse. Swift’s first eponymous album, released in fall of 2006, sold 5.4 million copies. Thanks to Swift, Big Machine Records never spent a single year in debt.

Swift’s own aggressive promotion of her work also spurred her rise. As a 16-year-old, Swift spent her summer mailing CDs to radio stations in hope they would hear her work and play it. More importantly, Swift was one of the first music artists to employ a then-novel marketing strategy: social media. Her active and relatable presence on MySpace, which allowed for more intimate and direct artist-fan interaction, generated a close connection between Swift and her followers (known as “Swifties”) that continues to this day.

Swift was a pretty face with a nice voice. Her songwriting ability, however, truly set her apart—and continues to set her apart.

After the 9/11 attacks, when she was just 11 or 12 years old, Swift wrote a song called “Didn’t They” in which she meditates on the tragedy and grapples with its meaning. A pre-teen Swift contrasts Islamic hijackers aiming to die for their god with a Christian man on the hijacked flight pointing out that Christ died for him. The nature of the divine was certainly on Swift’s young mind as she wrote. In the chorus she herself cries out to God. Swift wonders why he didn’t intervene on behalf of the victims of the attack who prayed for salvation:

And didn't they call you

Didn't they need you bad enough

Was there some reason

I'm not aware of

Did you not write it down

Just one more thing to do

Where were you

Where were you

And didn't they pray too

Swift’s poetry certainly isn’t the last word on the problem of evil and God’s goodness, but it is noteworthy that she was preoccupied by such questions at such a young age. She doesn’t just sing about being sad at watching scenes of death and destruction—which is what one might expect from a pre-teen girl—but goes further, connecting the tragedy to man’s relationship to the divine. Her poem isn’t just a statement of her beliefs either but a question. This very early work already reveals a degree of thoughtfulness and maturity that she would manifest throughout her career.

Swift’s most famous songs, such as “Shake it Off” and “Blank Space,” are the musical equivalent of cotton candy: pleasant but insubstantial. They are catchy bops meant for mass consumption. If we really want to understand Swift, though, we must dig deeper. And there is a lot to sift through. Swift is a prolific artist. In the past two decades, she’s released more than 230 songs, most of which she wrote herself.

Taylor on Loss

Swift might be most famous for her songs about her love life and breakups, but those aren’t her only concerns. In “Bigger than the Whole Sky,” released in 2022 on her Midnights album, Swift recounts the experience of suffering a miscarriage, likely with her then-longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn.

Swift honestly captures the grief of that loss, noting the sadness of watching the hoped-for future with her young child turn to “ashes.” Each chorus begins with a gentle refrain of “goodbyes” directed to the little one who, in Swift’s heart, is “bigger than the whole sky” and whose life in her womb was more than just a “short time.”

Any parent who has lost a child in miscarriage, who has felt the sudden snatching away of promise and life, will hear in Swift’s work a moving account of this often-private grief.

Swift, comments about her eggs notwithstanding, shows a strong maternal instinct in her work. In 2012, Taylor Swift wrote and released the song “Ronan” about a four-year-old boy named Ronan Thompson who passed away from cancer. During Ronan’s cancer fight, Swift found the blog written by the boy’s mother, Maya, about the experience. Swift turned Maya’s account of her son’s life and death into a tribute to the little boy. It speaks to Taylor’s emotional range and depth that she can so movingly portray a grief that was not her own. The whole song is worth a listen, but the following stanza is arguably the best:

What if I'm standing in your closet

Trying to talk to you?

And what if I kept the hand-me-downs

You won't grow into?

And what if I really thought some miracle

Would see us through?

What if the miracle was even getting

One moment with you?

Every parent faces the prospect of losing their child. It is simply a reality that children can and do die. There are no guarantees that these little ones will live to adulthood and yet we must go on living nonetheless in the face of mortality. We must accept, as parents, the sobering truth that sometimes the only “miracle” we will get is the fleeting time we’ve already had with our child. Swift recognizes that truth and makes it sing.

In “Soon You’ll Get Better,” Swift sings about her mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer. It is a pleading, heartfelt song. Swift says that her mother will “get better soon” because “she has to.” She balances this blind faith by saying she knows “delusion when she sees it in the mirror” but that she feels the need to “pretend” the diagnosis isn’t real. Swift sees a vision of the future without her mother and mourns:

And I hate to make this all about me

But who am I supposed to talk to?

What am I supposed to do

If there's no you?

Swift captures the experience of loss both from the perspective of a mother and as a daughter. She gives authentic voice to both sides of the equation in equal measure.

But Swift’s poetic accounts of family and private life aren’t all tragedies either. In “The Best Day” she praises her parents for giving her such a good childhood. She sings of her “excellent father” whose “strength is making me stronger” and notes that “God smiles on my little brother” who “inside and out” is better than she is. Channeling the childhood Taylor, Swift calls her mother the “prettiest lady in the whole world.”

Swift sings well about both the ordinary and the tragic. She gives voice to little moments and lets the audience share, respectfully, in her and other’s grief. Swift’s emotional honesty and vulnerability are real; they give her work a power that her pop star peers frequently lack. Neither Drake nor Rihanna nor SZA can do what Taylor does, neither can Ed Sheeran nor Ariana Grande nor Katy Perry.

Taylor Swift is the poet laureate of heartbreak. Her best song on the subject is, without question, the extended version of “All Too Well.”

Poet Laureate of Heartbreak

In this song, “All Too Well”—first released on Swift’s fourth album Red in 2012 and re-recorded at its original 10 minute length for Red (Taylor’s Version) in 2021—Swift puts her storytelling and lyrical talents on full display. Swift has said the 10 minute version of “All Too Well” took her the longest time to compose of all her songs. There is a good reason for this. Though Swift never says exactly who the song is about, it likely gives an account of her relationship, when she was 20 years old, with actor Jake Gyllenhaal. That detail is important because, as the lyrics to the song strongly hint, Swift lost her virginity to Gyllenhaal.

“All Too Well,” therefore, depicts Taylor’s loss of innocence. The lyrics show how she mourns that loss, as well as the shame and pain it brings her. The use of drums in the song itself evoke the musical qualities of a funeral march.

In the first verse, Swift makes mention of a scarf that her lover, though he has left her, still has in his possession. She gave it to him at the very beginning of their relationship.

And I left my scarf there at your sister's house

And you've still got it in your drawer, even now

Swift explicitly links the scarf to sex:

After plaid shirt days and nights when you made me your own

Now you mail back my things and I walk home alone

But you keep my old scarf from that very first week

'Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me

The scarf, Swift says, reminds her ex-lover of her and her “innocence.” Swift also notes that the two shared “nights” where he “made me your own.” The scarf, in this reading, is a likely stand-in for virginity. Though the lover mails back Swift’s things, he does not (perhaps cannot) send back the scarf. Swift says as much, stating that the lover “can’t get rid of it.” As much as Swift’s lover might wish to forget her, he cannot do so. Swift gave him, and he has taken, a piece of her that he cannot give back.

Swift cannot forget what she’s lost. Indeed, the song’s very title is a reference to remembering. Swift ends each chorus with the line “I remember it all too well” or a variation. The memory hurts Swift deeply. She says the love affair “maimed” her.

In verse 6, Swift describes the aftermath of the affair. She portrays herself as a soldier returning from war who has lost a “half” of herself (the lover) and wonders if her lover felt the same way:

I'm a soldier who's returning half her weight

And did the twin flame bruise paint you blue?

Just between us, did the love affair maim you too?

Swift gives us the alleged reasons for the breakup. Her lover thinks they are too far apart in age:

You said if we had been closer in age, maybe it would've been fine

And that made me want to die

The lover, though willing to make her “his own,” never told Swift that he loved her, despite her girlish hope that he would do so.

And I was thinkin' on the drive down, "Any time now,

He's gonna say it's love."

You never called it what it was

In another instance of Swift’s clever lyricism, she tells her (ex) lover, “You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath.” A few lines later, she follows up by saying:

And you call me up again just to break me like a promise

So casually cruel in the name of bein' honest

Swift’s oath, her promise, has been broken—not by her, but by the ex-lover.

In a scene that anyone familiar with modern dating has likely experienced, the former flames discuss their relationship after the breakup, a clinical attempt to achieve closure. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work. Swift shows poignantly how the supposed longing for “honesty” simply serves as a vehicle for casual cruelty.

Swift’s lover ultimately comes across as banal and thoughtless in the pain he inflicts. His excuse for the breakup turns out to have been a lie—it wasn’t really the age gap that kept them apart as Taylor reveals:

And I was never good at tellin' jokes, but the punch line goes

"I'll get older, but your lovers stay my age"

Swift’s ex-lover is casually cruel, but he only uses the “name” of honesty; he doesn’t actually tell her the truth about why their relationship ended as his subsequent relationships testify.

Swift began the song remembering the joyous first weeks of the relationship: “Autumn leaves were falling like pieces into place.” At the end of the song, after the relationship is over, it is winter and she remembers the “first fall of snow and how it glistened as it fell” in the now “barren cold” of the city. From coming together to falling apart. From puzzle pieces meshing together—an image of the completeness attained in love—to shattered barrenness and icy cold.

 “All Too Well” recounts a source of profound pain for millions of young men and women in our contemporary world. Swift is not the first young person to feel like a “crumpled piece of paper lying there” after a relationship that ended for arbitrary and (probably) stupid reasons.

Contemporary heartache

Swift’s use of metaphors of war and violence in “All Too Well” might seem overdramatic, but if I were given a choice between a gunfight for my life or divorce, I would choose the former every time.

In my own experience as both a military officer and an observer of human affairs, the trauma of divorce and relationship breakdown are far more likely indicators of suicidal ideation than combat trauma. Indeed, studies indicate that it is easier for children to handle the death of a parent than divorce.

In maxim number 12 of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche says that a man with a “why” can bear any “how.”  If a human being has purpose and meaning in their lives, they can bear great suffering. For most people, the loss of solid personal relationships can destroy such meaning. They lose their “why” and become far more vulnerable to psychological collapse than they otherwise would be. In “All Too Well,” Swift gives us a clear presentation of just how painful that loss can be. It sends her reeling.

It is worth noting that Swift herself is the child of divorce. Though she sings in praise of her family, we can see that there is a great deal of pain buried there, too. In the song “Mine,” from the 2010 album Speak Now, Swift describes a relationship between herself and an imagined lover and eventual husband.

Swift describes herself there as the “careful daughter of a careless father” and tells the imagined husband that he will learn why she is so restrained and cautious:

You learn my secrets and you figure out why I'm guarded

You say we'll never make my parents' mistakes

Swift makes clear that her parents have made mistakes. Her father, it seems, has been “careless” with the relationship with his own wife and with his daughter (Swift). Swift’s mother also shares in making the “mistakes” she references. In the song, Swift portrays a fight with the imagined husband, whom she calls the “best thing that’s ever been mine.”

Even though Swift loves this man—we see her accepting a marriage proposal in the music video—an inevitable fight occurs between the two. What follows gives the whole game away:

And I remember that fight, 2:30 AM

As everything was slipping right out of our hands

I ran out, crying, and you followed me out into the street

Braced myself for the goodbye

‘Cause that’s all I’ve ever known

Then you took me by surprise

You said, “I’ll never leave you alone”

After her lover intervenes to prevent her from giving into her unstable behavior, Swift ends the song with happy chords and a hopeful melody, singing,

Do you believe it?

We’re gonna make it now

And I can see it

I can see it now  

The problem is, Swift makes the same mistake as her parents in the song. She doesn’t stay. When things get hard, she storms out. No matter how much she might condemn her parents’ mistakes, she still repeats them; it has become the pattern that she “expects” and plays into. Swift, who earlier in the song describes herself as a “flight risk” does exactly what she warns she should—she runs away.  

The imagined husband here, however, takes a stand. He refuses to allow Taylor to leave. Even though Swift is acting turbulently, the husband doesn’t let her behavior stand. He moderates her, providing needed authority to ground her back in reality. In the music video for the song, this key moment is shown even more clearly. The video ends with touching scenes of Swift and her imagined husband with a family and children. They have a stable, sweet, and fecund marriage that brings her peace.

In the face of the chaos and instability of her own emotions and personal pain, Swift calls out for a calm and steady hand. In this case, the art is wiser than the artist. Swift knows what she needs, but she herself doesn’t know how to get it.

“Anti-Hero”: Swift’s Problem

In real life, as the years and boyfriends pass by without the needed authority to provide stability, Swift intentionally falls back into a dream world, a liminal and unbounded space of relationship chaos. In “Lavender Haze,” released in 2022, Swift sings of wanting to stay in a literal fog:

I feel the lavender haze creepin' up on me

Surreal, I'm damned if I do give a damn what people say

No deal, the 1950s shit they want from me

I just wanna stay in that lavender haze

All they keep askin' me (all they keep askin' me)

Is if I'm gonna be your bride

The only kind of girl they see (only kind of girl they see)

Is a one-night or a wife

Swift, acting the feminist in the face of her inability to find the kind of authoritative and stable husband she pines for in “Mine,” rejects the “1950s shit” that a nebulous “they” wants from her. “They” only conceive of a one-night or a wife, but Swift knows better (she claims). She remains ambiguous as to whether she truly wants her lover to ask her to be his bride. Instead of saying what she wants directly, she insists on staying in the “lavender haze”—the fog of indecision—that she apparently willingly chooses.

In the aftermath of losing her girlish innocence, Swift's music—and personal life—becomes provocatively “modern” and “edgy.” She’s play-fighting back against a patriarchy that has no real power in our time. In the song “Lover,” she swears her fealty to the “lover” with a corrupted marriage vow. Instead of pledging to take a husband “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death” as a “solemn vow,” she sings the following:

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand?

With every guitar string scar on my hand

I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover

My heart's been borrowed and yours has been blue

All's well that ends well to end up with you

She takes the magnetic force of a man not as a husband but as a boyfriend, as a lover. The serious and permanent is replaced with the frivolous and ephemeral. She notes that her heart has been damaged (“borrowed” by other men) and that he has been hurt, but all will now be well because the new lover and her are together. There is no sight or mention of children as there is in the music video for “Mine.”

It should surprise no one that the relationship didn’t work out. Swift can’t “have and hold” her romantic flames. There is no stability or permanence there, just more chaos, more change, more turmoil, and more heartbreak. Like the heroine in “Mine,” Swift hates the crazy but keeps indulging in it.

Love and art

In an interview for Vogue, Swift describes the creative process as having two elements. First, the artist needs to be open to the “lightning bolt moment” of inspiration but then also needs the “hard work element” to put that idea into practice. Her depiction of the creative process is a lot like falling in love.

When one sees the object of desire, it can feel like being struck by lightning. The desire appears in a flash. The yearning, the first kiss, and the intoxication of being desired in return are all phenomena that crackle with vital energy. One can be struck by eros out of nowhere. You are at a party, on the bus, or walking home from work and *BAM*, there she is, the One you’ve got to have. But love isn’t just butterflies and lightning bolts. In order to make a relationship work, in order to make it good for yourself and others (including your children), you have to make a choice to commit; you have to have the “hard work element” that goes into maintaining a stable and healthy life.

When it comes to Swift’s first love—music—Swift knows what to do. She knows that she needs to combine inspiration and discipline. But when it comes to her personal life, she does not know how to bring the two together. There’s a tension there, but no one can deny that Swift’s personal failures drive her musical success. Each new breakup, each new dramatic shattering, provides more fuel for her artistic fire.

It is too cynical to argue that Swift does all this on purpose, that her relationships are all the product of careful planning that she, from the very beginning, aims to exploit for profit. Swift, like all too many women in our time, lives in a perpetual lavender haze of relationship chaos that is both the work of her own hands and the product of a lack of needed social authority. Swift has the beauty, money, and sheer emotional endurance to indulge where others eventually collapse.

When Swift promises to be “overdramatic and true,” that is exactly right. She makes dramatic and compelling what is otherwise depressing and all too common. But she is not dishonest. Swift’s dramatization of her relationships helps make the painful insanity of of contemporary private life all the more clear. In her overdramatization, she bears forth the truth.

When Swift sings “I’m the problem, it’s me,” we should believe her. Swift has, in some way, chosen all this. She chooses to date men that are bad for her, who fail to come through when she most desperately needs them to provide authority and stability. In “peace,” a song likely dedicated to Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend of six years, Swift says:

I never had the courage of my convictions

As long as danger is near

And it's just around the corner, darling

'Cause it lives in me

No, I could never give you peace

Swift cannot give Joe the peace he needs because she is not at peace. In the next line, Swift compares herself to a fire. Swift is a furor of artistic and emotional energy who can’t settle down on her own. She needs an even greater force to come in from the outside and give her direction. Swift says she would give “you,” meaning Alwyn, “a child” and that she will sit with him in the “trenches” of life. But she can’t give him the stability, the peace, that would make all that possible. As Swift notes in “Bejeweled” a “What’s a girl gonna do? / A diamond’s gotta shine.” Swift “misses” shining and prefers, at least in part, the fame even with its pain to personal happiness.

In “You’re Losing Me,” we see more of the conversation with Joe and more evidence of Swift’s internal chaos. She says that the air between her and Joe is thick with “loss and indecision”:

And the air is thick with loss and indecision

I know my pain is such an imposition

Now, you're runnin' down the hallway

And you know what they all say

You don't know what you got until it's gone

The pain she is referring to likely refers to the loss of the child she promised in “peace” and whose miscarriage she mourned in “Bigger Than the Whole Sky.” Instead of making a decision to make things real and permanent through marriage, and then compelling Swift to uphold her part of the bargain, Alwyn runs away “down the hallway.”

The lavender haze that Swift once praised for its transgression of stultifying “1950s shit” relationship norms has become a serious problem for her. Turns out, it isn’t so fun to live in a fog.

Swift begs Alwyn to respond, to make a decision, to help her:

"Do something, babe, say something" (say something)

"Lose something, babe, risk something" (you're losin' me)

"Choose something, babe, I got nothing (got nothing)

To believe

Unless you're choosin' me"

Nothing comes of her pleas. Alwyn can’t come through for her:

I gave you all my best me's, my endless empathy

And all I did was bleed as I tried to be the bravest soldier

Fighting in only your army

Frontlines, don't you ignore me

I'm the best thing at this party

(You're losin' me)

And I wouldn't marry me either

A pathological people pleaser

Who only wanted you to see her

And I'm fadin', thinkin'

Alwyn won’t propose marriage, though Swift, returning to military metaphors, insists that she is a brave “soldier” fighting only in his army. The line “pathological people pleaser” sounds like something Alwyn told Swift in a fight, a rationalization for why they couldn’t be together. Swift retorts that, in the end, the only person she really wanted to please was him. She wanted Alwyn to see and understand her. He can’t.

If we take Swift at her word, there is something tragic in all this. Swift needs stability and decision. She whiplashes between the lavender haze, longing for children, and frustration at the restriction of her “fire,” of her talents. Alwyn can’t provide what Swift needs and so everything falls apart.

The Tyranny of Time, Mystical Time

Swift needs more than just the longings of the heart to guide her. She needs wisdom. She doesn’t have it. She therefore looks for it outside of herself. In “invisible string,” a song about falling in love with Alwyn, Swift sings about destiny bringing the two together.

Time, curious time

Gave me no compasses, gave me no signs

Were there clues I didn't see?

And isn't it just so pretty to think

All along there was some

Invisible string

Tying you to me?

Swift notes that “curious time” gave her no guidance for her relationships. “Time,” here better understood as accidental circumstance, is not a compass. She is right. The accidents of fortune and chance are not, on their own, useful guides for life. As Locke says in the First Treatise, reason is man’s only “star and compass.” It might be “pretty to think” that “all along” there has been an “invisible string” guiding us to happiness and peace, but that beautiful image is a charade.

Invisible strings are not enough. In order to have happiness we need the quite visible strings of reason and discipline. Time isn’t only, as Swift says, “curious,” “mysterious,” and “wondrous.” It is also harsh and tyrannical. Swift, of all people, should know this. As she sings in “All Too Well,” time “won’t fly”; she is “paralyzed by it.”

Time is a tyrant. Despite what Swift might feel in the midst of her pain, it stops for no man, bearing us all along its inevitable course. All human beings are on the path towards death. We are finite beings, bounded by the very real constraints of mortality.

Swift, if she were wise, would stop wasting her precious time on failures, no matter how beautifully she can spin them in the aftermath. When Swift sings about the invisible string carrying her to Joe, we should respond with raised eyebrows. The invisible string was clearly not enough in that case. It never could be.

Trump and Taylor; Masculine and Feminine

Swift is the spiritual avatar of modern western femininity. Her travails, longings, and insights are not restricted only to her personal experiences. They are, instead, windows into the heart and soul of our contemporary circumstance. Swift is a needy woman. She needs wisdom and peace. She needs children and stability—she says so herself in her art.

Swift might be liberated from the constraints of the older “patriarchal” world, but her feminism has not liberated her from the pain that older order was designed to shield her from. She is not liberated from necessity. She is certainly not liberated from her own mortality.

Swift is bound up in her own art. She has, as she sings in “You’re on Your Own Kid,” (released in 2022 on the Midnights album) given her “blood, sweat, and tears” for “this,” for her art and for her fame. But is it enough? Will it be enough for Swift to live on through words, no matter how beautifully written? What about children, the physical connection to the future and, through them, to eternity?

Swift, the consummate artist of heartbreak and loss, also yearns for completion and wholeness. Are children not a part of the expression of such a unity? Is a child not, in some sense, a work of art that can rival words on a page?

I pose these questions for Swift as a fellow (though much more modest) artist.

At a broader, more spiritual, level, Swift reveals both the problem and solution for the crisis of the collapse of the modern authority. Western women today need a source of stability and authority. They need wisdom and guidance, not “invisible strings” or the guidance of “mysterious” (and cruel) Time.

Here at last we see the unity between Taylor Swift’s art and Donald Trump’s political project.

Swift is the spiritual avatar of the feminine element in our contemporary life; Trump represents the masculine. Trump came to power on the slogan “Build the Wall.” That simple phrase embodies, in a key way, the essence of masculinity. Trump ran on a platform of building and enforcing boundaries. Trump makes and highlights distinctions: between citizen and alien, friend and enemy, decline and greatness.

Trump, like Swift, is also concerned with memory and time. His movement exists to “Make America Great Again.” Trump looks at the greatness of the past and seeks to root the nation, once again, in that foundation. Trump looks backwards not to mourn what is broken but to facilitate what is better. Trump, spiritually, offers the antidote to Swift’s angst; Trump offers boundaries, order, and greatness to Swift’s chaotic but vibrant energy.

It is no accident that Trump thinks much better of Swift than she does of him. Trump might say he likes her music “25% less,” but he still likes it. In 2014, Melania Trump posted a video to Facebook of Trump cruising around NYC in his Rolls Royce, Barron in the seat next to him, vibing to Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space.”

In 2012, Trump publicly thanked Swift for the “beautiful picture” of herself and called her “fantastic.” Later that year, Trump tweeted that he was “glad to hear” that Taylor was hosting the Grammys because “Taylor is terrific!”

In our time of toxic feminist ideology, it is no coincidence that man sees more clearly the need for woman than woman sees the need for man. Trump, at least subconsciously, perceives Swift’s excellence in a way that she does not perceive his.

Though the feminine needs the masculine and the masculine needs the feminine, the two have been sundered in our time. To their own detriment, a good portion of today’s women (especially those who are unmarried) explicitly praise and defend that separation. They have been told—and many, at least officially, believe—that this separation is for their good, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Swift, like lots of young unmarried white women, is a liberal who reacts in frenzied rejection to Donald Trump and his kind. This political fact rests on an underlying sexual reality. Our politics isn’t only the playing out of policy wonkery and ideological arguments, but of much deeper and murkier psychological and biological drives. There is much that lies beneath the “I” that supposedly “thinks.”

Swift both needs and rejects authority. She is like a river overflowing every embankment—turbulent, striking, and potent. No matter how impressive she might be, there’s also a serious problem here. Swift needs dams and dykes to make her vital energy and potential good for life. She isn’t going to provide these embankments herself. Women are not inherently civilized. Feminist liberation, at core, is a return to primordial chaos.

That is bad.

The Leader

As young men and young women are headed in opposite directions politically, they are headed in opposite directions relationally. American dating and family life therefore are in chaos. This disjuncture is, for most people, the greatest source of unhappiness and pain. It has become a great political crisis too. Solving this crisis will take everything our wisest politicians and most compelling poets have to offer.

What we can say for certain is that men must lead the way. They must build the needed embankments. They need the strength of spirit and self-confidence that such a task calls for. Women will not save themselves from the chaos and many of them will, like Swift, work to perpetuate it. Even a poet of Swift’s insight and talent can’t implement the needed solutions, even when she perceives them. The feminine requires masculine guidance—and, dare we say, masculine husbandry.

All the self-empowered talk in the world can’t change reality. The women of the West need the authority that only the men of the West can provide. Taylor Swift’s art is a clarion call, a cry for help. And those of us with the eyes to see and the ears to hear should answer it.

Taylor Swift herself might be beyond saving, but if we say the same about her followers, about the millions of women who see in her art their own struggles and longings, then we have effectively given up on civilization. We should not do that. Instead of dismissing these women, we must lead them. Instead of sneering at them, we must seduce them—seduce them back to health, reason, and sanity. When that is not enough, we must have the toughness to go further—to stand our ground and to push back against the forces of dissolution and chaos.

The political leader of the future who most clearly recognizes this reality and the virtues it demands will represent the greatest promise for the revitalization of our civilization.