Donald Trump acknowledged that images he posted online depicting Taylor Swift endorsing him for president and several supposedly showing Swifties supporting him were fake. But the ex-president did not seem concerned the pop star will sue him, saying that the AI images “were all made up by other people.”
Trump addressed the controversy in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Grady Trimble. In a segment that aired Wednesday on the network, Trimble asked Trump, “Are you worried that Taylor Swift is going to sue you?” (via Mediaite).
Trump responded, “I don’t know anything about them, other than somebody else generated them. I didn’t generate them… These were all made up by other people.”
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In the interview, Trump then said that he himself has been a victim of AI deepfakes. “AI is always very dangerous in that way. It’s happening with me too. They’re making — having me speak. I speak perfectly, I mean, absolutely perfectly on AI, and I’m, like, endorsing other products and things. It’s a little bit dangerous out there.”
Neither Swift nor her reps have commented on Trump’s post with the fake endorsement. As of Thursday morning, Trump’s post on Truth Social about Swift was still available on the platform.
Trump on Sunday posted several AI-generated images on his Truth Social account showing women wearing “Swifties for Trump” shirts. (Two photos in Trump’s post were real and showed the same fan with a T-shirt that said “Swifties for Trump.”) Another AI image showed Swift dressed as Uncle Sam next to the message: “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.” Trump wrote in the caption to the post, “I accept!”
Swift has yet to publicly back a candidate in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. In 2020, she endorsed Joe Biden and took aim at Trump in a tweet that year following his response to the protests that erupted in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.
