Former Trump Official Was Warned She’d Be Fired If She Played Taylor Swift in the White House
It sounds as though the musical stylings of Taylor Swift were not playing on repeat in the White House when Donald Trump held the presidency.
The hit-maker was famously apolitical for most of her career. That changed in 2018 when she voiced support for Democratic candidates Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper ahead of the midterm elections in Tennessee, according to NPR. Trump expressed his displeasure at the time by telling reporters that he liked Swift's music about "25 percent less" after the move, according to CNN.
Swift continued to use her voice to preach equality (such as with her song "You Need To Calm Down") and speak out against gun violence. She then publicly came out in support of President Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. Based on Trump's prior metrics, it's a safe bet that Swift became pretty unpopular in the White House.
Apparently, it was a tough time to be a Swiftie while serving in the White House, too.
So much so that Olivia Troye, a former homeland security, counterterrorism and coronavirus adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, told MSNBC that a coworker warned her not to play Swift's music in her office.
In an interview, she detailed returning to her office and putting Swift on at a high volume after a meeting that didn't go well. She said her colleague knocked on her door and asked if she was "trying to get fired."
Troye expressed confusion on why she'd be fired. The colleague explained that Swift's music was off limits because the singer wasn't a "fan of Trump."
"You should really be careful about that," Troye said her colleague warned her.
"That is just so astonishing to me," she added. "It's late, I'm allowed to listen to whatever music I want."
She admitted to Insider that she did turn the music down after recognizing that there may be some validity to the warning.
"The last thing I needed was an excuse for someone to use against me and undermine my work," she explained. "I had seen it happen to others. It was an environment where you had to be very guarded about everything,"
It sounds like the warning may have carried some weight.
In his book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, author Jonathan Karl details a situation when Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows reportedly had to leave a hearing to take a phone call about an assistant in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Why? The assistant liked Swift's Instagram post that endorsed Biden. Oh, the horror!
The segment recently appeared in The Atlantic and reveals just how much of an enemy Swift apparently was to the White House at the time.
Clearly this was a moment when Trump's team could have taken some advice from Swift and calmed down...