After plenty of speculation as to whether she would wade into the 2024 presidential election, Taylor Swift chose to resoundingly endorse Vice President Kamala Harris over Donald Trump on a Tuesday night in which the opponents met for a pretty lopsided debate. In an Instagram post that quickly garnered millions of likes, the pop superstar addressed AI images generated to make it appear as if she supported Trump that were shared by the Republican candidate; conveyed her alarm at the problem of misinformation; said the Harris-Walz ticket fights for the causes she cares about; and encouraged her followers to register to vote no matter whom they support.
She signed off on the post with a jab at comments by Trump running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) characterizing the Democrats as a party of “childless cat ladies” — by identifying as one herself.
The exact weight of Swift’s endorsement in the national race is hard to immediately measure, but it was an emphatic statement from an influential superstar with an army of energized fans. And it seems that at least one major Trump supporter, the always-thirsty Elon Musk, thought he could weave viral magic by responding to her with an offer of insemination. “Fine Taylor,” Musk posted on X, the website he owns that continues to smolder in the ruins of Twitter, “you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”
Musk, who has fathered 12 known children, is currently engaged in a custody battle with former girlfriend Grimes over three of them, and had three others with one of his employees at brain-chip implant company Neuralink, has long promoted an unfounded panic that Western countries are headed into “population collapse.” In 2022, he tweeted “I am doing my part haha” with respect to human reproduction. He has also amplified claims of “great replacement” theory, a conspiracy theory that falsely holds that liberals and Jewish people are facilitating mass illegal immigration of people of color in order to turn white Westerners into a culturally oppressed minority.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO retweeted and engaged with anti-Harris and anti-media posts on his platform during the Tuesday evening debate and in the hours following, while sharing little in the way of praise for Trump. He appeared to be tickled, however, by the notion that the election could come down an allegiance to either him or Swift. Replying to a tweet from an account declaring, “Oh my God, this has really become an Elon vs Taylor Swift election now,” he posted his favorite emoji, the laugh-crying face. It was an hour later that Musk, whose recreational drug use and at times erratic behavior have worried the leadership at his companies, tweeted his line about impregnating Swift and protecting her cats.
An hour later, it had about 50,000 likes, along with almost 10,000 replies, alternating between disgust and approval. Neither Swift nor her boyfriend, NFL star and three-time Super Bowl-winner Travis Kelce, have responded to the overture.