Missed Messaging

A few hours ahead of Sunday's Super Bowl game, Donald Trump posted the following to his "Truth Social" platform:

There's no way [Taylor Swift] could endorse Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President in the History of our Country, and be disloyal to the man who made her so much money.

So far, so Donald Trump. I've already opined about the fact that I don't think that Taylor Swift is as much of a political kingmaker as Right-wing/Republican paranoia makes her out to be, so I won't belabor that point here. The point of interest this time is National Public Radio, and their impression of Mr. Trump's words, which they first describe as "Trump's appeal to Swift" and then later as "Trump's plea."

It had caught my attention because it seemed like they were soft-pedaling Mr. Trump's tone. I saw nothing in Mr. Trump's words that came across as an appeal, let alone pleading. So I conjectured that maybe NPR didn't want to arouse the ire of the Make America Great Again crowd by calling him out for being aggressive towards Ms. Swift. But on re-reading, it occurred to me that maybe they just didn't know what to make of it all. NPR was framing the post as if Taylor Swift were the audience, rather than simply the subject, even though there is nothing about it that would indicate this. Donald Trump is perfectly capable of speaking to people when that is his intent. And that doesn't seem to be the intent here. If anything, given the fact that it refers to Ms. Swift in the third person, it's priming his followers to be angry with her in the even that she does decide to endorse President Biden. It's simply Donald Trump publicly reinforcing the idea that many of his supporters already have, that Taylor Swift has no business in politics.

To be sure, he's being circumspect about it; he avoids saying any directly negative about Ms. Swift. Given his penchant for name calling, he could have easily come up with some playground derogation and attached it to her, then railed against her. But he doesn't. Rather, his tone is one of assuring his followers that Taylor Swift owes him, and therefore, their concerns that she'll turn her legions of followers against the Republicans this fall are misplaced. In other words, Donald Trump's not appealing to Ms. Swift, he's speaking to pretty much the only people he ever speaks to; the people who want him to be President again. It's odd that NPR seems to have missed that.