We came across the following post from 18 October on the social media platform X:
The post—which was written by an account that appeared to mimic an official account of Trump or one affiliated with him—claimed that Taylor Swift had declared that she would ‘leave the US for London if Trump is elected President’.
A search on X revealed several similar posts regarding Swift’s intention to leave the US in the event of a Trump victory, with the posts generally emerging in three waves: first in February 2024, then in July, and most recently in November, following the conclusion of the elections.
A keyword search online, however, revealed no evidence to substantiate the claim. We did, however, find multiple factchecks by Snopes addressing the issue. The first, in February 2024, investigated the claim that Swift and her partner, the American football player Travis Kelce, had announced they would leave the US. The second investigated the claim that Swift and Miley Cyrus had expressed intentions to leave.
Both sets of claims were found to be false, though it noted that when Trump first ran for president in 2016, Miley Cyrus had suggested she would leave the country if Trump won. She later walked back these statements, calling them ‘ignorant’ and ‘dumb’. There is no evidence that she had made similar statements more recently.
Snopes’ investigation of the claims around Swift noted that their emergence coincided with the night of the Super Bowl on 11 February. At the time, conspiracy theories were swirling around the Super Bowl, with allegations that matches were being fixed in favour of the Kansas City Chiefs, the team for whom Kelce played.
In addition, there were claims, including from the former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, that the ‘fixed’ Super Bowl victory for the Chiefs had political motivations, as Swift and Kelce would then endorse Joe Biden for the 2024 presidential election.
Amid the politically charged atmosphere surrounding the Super Bowl, one theory that emerged was that Swift and Kelce would leave the US if Trump were to win the election.
However, Snopes found no evidence to support this claim at the time, and neither did other reputable fact-checkers such as Politifact, Reuters Fact Check and CheckYourFact. A more recent fact check in October by MEAWW similarly found no evidence for the claim.
When we investigated the social media accounts posting the claims more closely, we found that Swift and Kelce were far from the only celebrities to be the targets of such claims. On the page of one account, besides Swift and the abovementioned Miley Cyrus, we found claims that celebrities such as Tom Hanks, John Legend, Bruce Springsteen and Cher would also be leaving the US if Trump won.
Many of these celebrities—with the exception of Hanks, who had nevertheless endorsed Hillary Clinton previously—had endorsed Kamala Harris, the Democratic challenger to Trump, for the presidential election, suggesting a political motivation to the posts.
As Snopes notes, however, the repetitive nature of the posts, combined with the popularity of the celebrities and the false description of the claim as ‘breaking’ news, suggests that the posts best resemble engagement bait.
These are attempts to bring in responses in the form of shares, likes and comments in order to boost the reach of the accounts by posting about relatable or hot-button subjects, without regard as to whether the posts were true or false. Some of the posts were reposted by the accounts, even after they had been thoroughly debunked. Several of the posts about Swift’s impending departure were highly prolific, and therefore successful in terms of engagement.
As such, we find the claims that Swift said she would leave the US if Trump was elected to be false, as there is no evidence to suggest that she or her partner made such a statement.
