Given the pandemonium surrounding Taylor Swift’s over-the-top celebrity in the last year, it was probably inevitable that the star would be drawn into the American presidential race.

The contretemps that resulted was greeted with ridicule by most sober-minded people. But it is still an insight into the air of both absurdity and menace that still hangs over the country as the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency looms.

Like most cultural figures in America, Swift is appalled by Donald Trump. She endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. She accused Trump of “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism” and vowed to help vote him out of office. This campaign, however, she’s been silent; she has, after all, been amidst a world tour that, just in 2023, grossed more than a record $1.5 billion in ticket sales.

However, when her new boyfriend – an American football player named Travis Kelce – ended up in the Super Bowl, a certain segment of the American right-wing echosphere went nuts with a conspiracy theory: That the CIA was behind an effort to hand Kelce’s team the Super Bowl championship, at which time American Sweetheart Swift and her over-muscled beau would use the opportunity to endorse Biden over Trump.

That didn’t happen, of course. So what drove all the conspiracy theorising? And by the way, given the scorn she’s shown towards Trump in the past, why hasn’t she been making her feelings known each night on stage?

To take the latter question first, did I mention her billion-dollar tour? Swift is making breathtaking amounts of money – close to $20 million a night this weekend in Sydney, by my calculations – and has a very serious organisation behind her. It’s bad business for a star to do anything that might polarise her audience, or stop a fan from shelling out an extra $100 for a Taylor Swift sweatshirt – or a $400 tour jacket.

And that brings us to the right-wing attacks on Swift. While just about everyone laughed at the conspiracy theories, there was actual menace there as well. The point was to get America’s violence-prone right-wing fringe, which has a definite taste for a good conspiracy theory, stirred up. America has been wracked by political violence and intimidation in the years since Trump came on the scene.

And that is precisely how that tactic works. Indeed, if you watched the Super Bowl, you noted that, after weeks of hype, the coverage of her was strangely muted. If the bullies hadn’t come out blaring, we would have seen her a lot more, and heard a lot more talk about it, on the broadcast.