Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris for president after debate ends

Taylor Swift said on Tuesday night that she’s voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the November election, saying Harris is a “steady-handed, gifted leader.”

In an Instagram post minutes after the debate between Harris and former President Donald Trump ended, Swift said she was voting for Harris because “she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”

“We can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift wrote. She said she was “so heartened and impressed” that Harris chose Walz as her running mate, “who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”

Swift posted a photo from her Time “Person of the Year” shoot, which shows her youngest cat, Benjamin Button, draped across her shoulder.

Swift signed the post “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady,” a nod to vice president candidate JD Vance’s previous denigrating comments about the U.S. being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

[Harris and Trump detail their starkly different visions in a tense, high-stakes debate]

Last month on Truth Social, Trump’s social media site, the former president shared images created using artificial intelligence that suggested that Swift had endorsed him and that her fans could help him win in November.

One image showed a group of young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” shirts, and another showed Swift dressed up as Uncle Sam, with the headline: “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.”

“It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Swift wrote in her post. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”

The images were shared by a social media influencer, and re-shared by Trump, who added: “I accept.”