It’s actually sweet......

Gavin Newsom uses new Taylor Swift album to troll Donald Trump

By Lester Black

Taylor Swift’s surprise midnight Friday album drop has taken over the internet and quickly worked itself into the current biggest personal rivalry in American politics.

Gov. Gavin Newsom released a TikTok video Friday afternoon showing a montage of his interactions with President Donald Trump set to Swift’s new song “Actually Romantic.” The video shows Trump’s tweets attacking Newsom captioned with the lyrics, “It’s actually sweet, all the time you’ve spent on me.”

The Friday video is only the latest jab in a duel that’s come to epitomize the subterranean lows American political dialogue has reached. Trump has spent the past decade eroding political norms with a constant stream of name-calling, overstatements, outright lies and all-caps social media posts aimed at whoever crosses his mind. Newsom has recently responded in kind, with his own stream of rants and foul-mouthed social media posts, usually aimed at Trump or one of Trump’s followers.

Newsom’s trolling has angered Republicans, but the governor’s office has said that he’s merely “holding a mirror to MAGA” to show how ridiculous the movement is. Trump, for his part, has shown no signs of paring back, and is only taking his posts to even more dystopian depths. The Trump team released a doctored video this week that used fake audio and racist imagery to make it seem like Democratic leaders were taking credit for the federal government’s shutdown.

While American leaders trade barbs over deepfake videos and the lyrics of the latest pop song, the country’s problems show no signs of abating. Job creation is slowing to troubling levels, health care costs are soaring and the youth unemployment rate is at its highest in decades.

But back in the social media sphere, Newsom chose to back his latest attack on Trump with a particularly angsty tune. Swift’s “Actually Romantic” describes a rivalry between someone who once called the pop singer a “Boring Barbie” and high-fived her ex for ghosting her. Fans were quick to pin the song on an apparent clash between Swift and pop singer Charli xcx, who released a song titled “Everything is Romantic” last year. 

Trump has nurtured his own conflict with Swift, though it’s one sided. After the mega-pop star endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, Trump eventually posted on Truth Social, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” and later, that she’s “NO LONGER HOT.” Naturally, Newsom took the opportunity to declare: “DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER ‘HOT.’”

Friday’s video culminates in Swift’s “no man has ever loved me like you do,” which has a ring coming from Swift but falls a bit flat given Newsom is by most accounts heterosexual.