Trump and Taylor are tusslin' on TikTok

After Taylor Swift's team yanked her song's audio from one of the administration's TikTok videos, they fired back with some of the weakest song parodies you've ever seen.

By William Hughes | August 8, 2026 | 3:31pm

Taylor Swift, Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Music News Taylor Swift

In the grand pantheon of things filling us with a deep and resonant sense of the inherent dignity of being alive during All Of This, nothing tickles our sense of American exceptionalism quite like our current Commander-In-Chief’s tendency to get into pissy little power struggles with well-known pop stars. It’s a key part of the Trump White House’s policy of better governance through bullying, after all, as the official communication channels for the American executive do things—as they did this week—like blast out TikTok videos featuring the music of people like Taylor Swift, an artist who has thrown her support behind Donald Trump’s opponents in multiple national elections at this point, with captions attached like “I’m sure Taylor Swift is going to be super excited we used her song.”

And while Swift—whose popularity ratings, it’s worth noting, dwarf Trump’s these days—usually doesn’t usually take the bait on this kind of thing, her team did take advantage of the fact the incitement was happening on TikTok to pull the audio of Swift’s “August” from the Team Trump video in question. Which is suitably classy and subtle, sure, but also kind of played into the current right-wing playbook of massive escalation in the face of even the slightest pushback. Meaning POTUS’ online representatives responded by coming up with some of the worst pro-Trump Taylor Swift parody song titles you’ve ever heard, inventing a fake Red (Donald Trump’s Version) listing, and filling it with the output of their collectively channeled Weak Al Yankovics. That includes a fake track list deploying such knee-slappers as “Everything Has Changed (At Our Southern Border)” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (The Biden Harris Administration),” because nothing says “unrelenting hilarity” like tacking an awkward parenthetical on to an existing song title—or continuing to lob strikes at the Biden administration, even though it’s 20 goddamn 26.

Anyway, Swift’s team hasn’t responded to this latest provocation, presumably because she’s busy living her freshly married life, enjoying broad national support, and also isn’t facing down the horrors of a looming midterm election with approval ratings lurking down in the mid-30s.

Join the discussion...

Keep scrolling for more great stories.