Trump’s Latest Gripe About Taylor Swift Will Crack You Up

The all-business, very important, couldn’t-be-missed meeting between Donald Trump and House Republicans Thursday quickly devolved into a mess, with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee apparently more focused on obsessing over his appeal to celebrities than discussing concrete policy changes intended to aid the American people.

In his first visit to Capitol Hill since before the January 6 insurrection, Trump ranted and raved, lasering in on key issues such as how Representative Nancy Pelosi is too old for him to date, slamming Wisconsin—the host of the Republican National Convention in July—as a “horrible city,” and, somehow most surprisingly, obsessing over Taylor Swift’s alleged support for President Joe Biden.

“Why would she endorse this dope?” Trump wondered, according to CNN’s Melanie Zanona. “He doesn’t know how to get off a stage.”

Swift has not endorsed anyone for the 2024 presidential election yet.

Days earlier, reports emerged that Trump had mused about Swift’s looks during a November 2023 conservation with Variety co–editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh.

“I think she’s beautiful—very beautiful!” Trump said at the time. “I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually—unusually beautiful!”

Swift was notoriously close-lipped about her political beliefs, even through the 2016 presidential election, when she was rumored to be a closet Republican—but that changed when she sided with Tennessee Democrats in the 2018 midterms against now-Senator Marsha Blackburn.

“Back in the [2016] presidential election, I was in such a horrendous place that I wasn’t going to pop my head out,” Swift explained in her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana. “These aren’t your dad’s celebrities and these aren’t your dad’s Republicans.… I need to be on the right side of history.”

Even with a stacked year that includes running for U.S. president, several criminal trials, serving a sentence, and owing half a billion dollars in legal penalties, Trump still can’t seem to shake Swift from his mind. In private, Trump has promised a “holy war” against the singer if she chooses to endorse Biden in the upcoming election. He has also privately bragged that he’s “more popular” than the internationally recognized pop superstar.

Republicans, meanwhile, appeared less interested in idle gossip. When they left the highly anticipated reunion with Trump, they described it as more of a “pep talk” than anything else.

In the same week that he rambled about electric boats and shark attacks, Donald Trump’s newest riff is one of his most bizarre yet.

During a closed-door policy meeting Thursday with House Republicans, Trump mused about his and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s romantic compatibility, reported Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman. Trump even alleged that one of Pelosi’s daughters had brought it up in conversation with him.

“Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is a whacko, her daughter told me if things were different Nancy and I would be perfect together, there’s an age difference though,” Trump reportedly said.

Pelosi’s daughter Christine, for her part, vehemently denied that the implausible interaction took place.

“Speaking for all 4 Pelosi daughters—this is a LIE,” Christine Pelosi tweeted. “His deceitful, deranged obsession with our mother is yet another reason Donald Trump is unwell, unhinged and unfit to step foot anywhere near her—or the White House.”

Trump has previously waded into Pelosi family discourse, mocking Pelosi’s husband, Paul, after a right-wing conspiracist broke into their San Francisco home and attacked him with a hammer, fracturing his skull. In 2019, Trump called Pelosi, then speaker of the House, “a disgrace to herself and her family.”

Justice too delayed is justice too denied: The Supreme Court on Thursday tragically rejected a First Amendment complaint against the Patent and Trademark Office for rejecting a trademark of the phrase “Trump too small.”

The fateful phrase first came to fore following a calculated zinger from Marco Rubio during a 2016 Republican debate. Once upon a time, the debates were largely viewed as absurd chaos spirals from noncontenders for office, an opportunity for anyone with a dream and a little graphic design knowledge to craft some chintzy merch that gets flooded in the replies of viral tweets by spambots for years to come.

“And you know what they say about guys with small hands,” Rubio said with a grin to a chuckling crowd a lifetime ago. “You can’t trust ’em!”

Eight years later, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to those aspiring to turn zesty one-liners about Trump into trademarked merch. Steve Elster, an employment lawyer and progressive activist, crafted the shirt and applied to register “Trump too small” in 2018. The patent office rejected the patent based on the Lanham Act, which denies patents containing the names of living people without their written consent, on the basis that people would reasonably associate the trademark with the person.

A federal circuit court ruled that the Lanham Act doesn’t extend to content criticizing a government official or public figure. That ruling was kicked up to the Supreme Court by the Biden administration on behalf of the U.S. Patent Office.

Most Supreme Court justices concurred on the decision to reject Esler’s case, led by Clarence Thomas. Thomas concluded that there was a “tradition” of rejecting trademarks that include a person’s name, writing, “We see no reason to disturb this long standing tradition, which supports the restriction of the use of another’s name in a trademark.”

During oral arguments, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested upholding the rejection, noting, “The question is: Is this an infringement on speech? And the answer is no. He can sell as many shirts with this saying and the government’s not telling him he can’t use the phrase, he can’t sell it anywhere he wants. There’s no limitation on him selling it. So there’s no traditional infringement.”

As noted by Sotomayor, Elster’s merch has had no issues being sold, except perhaps for lack of interest. “Trump too small” is still available for purchase, marked down from $39.99 to $24.99.

South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace bragged about her record supporting civil rights—but was quickly called out for leaving out a major detail.

Mace appeared on CNN Wednesday night to discuss the House vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over audio of President Joe Biden’s classified documents case interview with special counsel Robert Hur. Speaking with Laura Coates, Mace bravely posed as a guardian of due process.

“I work on a lot of civil rights issues. I was the ranking member of the civil rights subcommittee last session on oversight. Due process is a really important issue,” she said. Mace did not, however, mention why she’s no longer the ranking member of the subcommittee: She helped lead the charge to disband it.

It’s not the first time Mace has trotted out this defense. In January, at a House Oversight Committee hearing during which Hunter Biden testified, she tried to beat back criticism from Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett that she had misused the term “white privilege” while questioning Biden, citing her former ranking position on the subcommittee.

“I take great pride as a white female Republican to address the inadequacies in our country,” Mace said.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quickly pointed out, though, that Mace’s position appeared more valuable to her as a title to be wielded over Democrats than an actual leadership role in safeguarding the rights of minorities across the country. After all, the subcommittee did not just cease to exist. Mace, along with Kentucky Representative and abortive Biden impeachment architect James Comer, had overseen its elimination in early 2023.

Crockett had noted during the hearing that “rather than squandering their authority on investigations of the president’s family, the chairman and House Republicans should use their authority to conduct oversight and investigate the merciless murders of innocent Americans—mainly Americans who look like me—at the hands of law enforcement.”

That hasn’t stopped Mace—who has been in the news recently for potential ethics violations and mistreatment of staff—from loudly proclaiming her civil rights bona fides when they are of political use to her. Right-wing retconning of the conservative civil rights record is nothing new, however; they’ve done it about Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights Act, and plenty of other now-popular causes they once opposed. But as the right continues to openly repudiate those civil rights achievements, Mace’s convenient lie of omission may become increasingly rare.

Hoping to be Donald Trump’s running mate, Senator J.D. Vance is trying to butter up his son Donald Trump Jr.

On X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday morning, the Ohio politician shared an Axios post calling the younger Trump “MAGA’s new kingmaker,” and called him “one of the best people I’ve met in politics.”

The post was immediately mocked online, as users pointed out the pathetic suck-up attempt.

It’s only the latest move from Vance to curry favor with the former president and convicted felon. Vance has introduced a performative bill to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion principles from the federal government, and implied that he would have carried out a coup in favor of Trump if he were vice president on January 6, 2021. He said he would accept the 2024 election results—if Trump is the victor. He also criticized the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over Trump’s hush-money trial, on Trump’s behalf since the Republican presidential nominee was bound by a gag order.

When Trump will pick a vice president is anyone’s guess, but Vance is supposedly among his top four, along with Senators Marco Rubio and Tim Scott and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. With Vance’s claim to fame being the narrative of climbing out of rural poverty to wealth and education (before embracing MAGA and attacking the elite institutions he benefited from), he may have an advantage over the other candidates. Trump also supposedly “likes people who are rich and have hot wives,” according to one source.

According to Vance, the Trump campaign has ironically asked prospective vice presidential candidates whether they have been convicted of a crime.