Taylor Swift is many things. But she did not, at least until recently, look like the battleground on which an election could be fought.
Though on reflection, maybe it makes a weird kind of sense. Like Donald Trump, whose allies are said to be threatening a remarkably silly-sounding “holy war” against the singer, Swift is an unstoppable cultural phenomenon with a deep hold over the American psyche. She epitomises what many young women want to be – powerful but joyful, financially independent, patently not in need of a man but having zero trouble getting one – while he stands for all those threatened by this subversion of the patriarchal order.
