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After wrapping up his newsmaking four-day Middle Eastern trip on Friday, President Donald Trump settled down on Air Force One and appeared to take part in his two favorite activities – watching cable news and rage-posting about celebrities he believes have been mean and nasty to him.
In a seemingly random and unprovoked attack, Trump fired off a Truth Social post about pop megastar Taylor Swift, asking his followers if they had noticed that “since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’”
This is hardly the first time the president has lashed out at the “Shake It Off” singer, especially after she endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020 and then backed Kamala Harris last year. That came on the heels of Trump reposting AI-generated images of Swift supposedly endorsing him for president.
“I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” Trump raged at the time, insisting that she would soon “pay a price” for spurning him.
Even though the president has continued to hold a grudge against Swift, why all of a sudden did he decide to re-air his grievances after recently departing Abu Dhabi following a busy foreign trip? Unlike Bruce Springsteen, whom Trump also raged at on Friday after The Boss blasted him during a concert in the UK, Swift had not recently said anything negative (or otherwise) about the president.
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As appears to be the case with much of the president’s social media feed throughout the years, he was likely reacting to something he had just seen on Fox News.
In the final hour of Fox & Friends, which is well known to be Trump’s favorite morning show, the program featured a quick news report on Rhode Island police finding what appears to be human remains just a short distance from Swift’s seaside mansion in the luxurious Watch Hill neighborhood.
“Human remains were discovered down the road from Taylor Swift's Rhode Island mansion amid fears a New England serial killer is on the loose,” Fox News host Carley Shimkus noted. “Officers say they arrived on the scene Wednesday and located what appeared to be a leg bone. It was found over a quarter-mile from Swift’s home.”
Turning to the other hosts on the couch, Shimkus said: “Sorry to leave it on that note.” Roughly an hour after this report aired, the president fired off his Truth Social post.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For years now, the president’s tweeting (and now “truthing”) habits have been heavily influenced by his round-the-clock bingeing of cable news – which always includes an oversized scoop of Fox News.
During his first term, for instance, Trump would generally send out multiple tweets a day responding in real time to what he saw on the conservative cable giant. A study by Media Matters found that in 2019, the president sent out 657 live tweets of Fox programming, with Fox & Friends accounting for a third of them.
English (US) ·