An editorial board weaponizes Taylor Swift’s feminism to both-sides Donald Trump into a romantic misjudgment. A board member published a piece on June 14 that builds its argument on a false equivalence between Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner and the sitting president, using Swift’s lyrics and dating-wisdom register as both delivery mechanism and moral cover. The piece is not about Taylor Swift, or about bad boys, or about the human condition; the piece is about making sure a Maine voter who reads the Journal editorial page comes away thinking the Democratic Senate nominee is a toxic-masculinity hypocrite and Trump’s unfitness is just another verse in an old song. We who built versions of this kind of frame — the cultural-hook op-ed that makes a partisan payload feel like universal wisdom — will recognize the machinery.
But even before the operation announces itself, the piece has already begun its work. The opening paragraphs do not offer the reader a frame; they deliver a verdict. The first Swift lyric the piece deploys is applied specifically to Platner: the Nazi-tattooed oysterman as the archetype of the dissolute man. The frame appears in paragraph four — “Voters keep picking bad boys who provide a thrill and ultimately disappoint” — only after the reader has already been taught that Platner equals bad boy equals Swift’s lyrical subject. The frame is not the lens; it is the after-the-fact justification for a judgment already absorbed. I recognize the craft. The piece never intends to examine a universal pattern and discover Platner fits it; it intends to target Platner and wrap him in a universal to make the targeting feel inevitable. The Swift lyrics are the wrap. The piece deploys eight distinct techniques across its paragraphs; this column walks through them as they appear.
You don’t need to be a Swift fan to appreciate how her heartbreak songs reflect an acute political problem: Voters keep picking bad boys who provide a thrill and ultimately disappoint.
Frame-engineered relabeling — WSJ §A.1 (the page’s signature technique); Bad-Faith Catalog: frame_engineered_relabeling — operates here by borrowing Swift’s romantic lyric register and applying it to political misconduct. This is the piece’s load-bearing frame: voting choices become dating choices. “Bad boys” is not a neutral descriptor — it is the language of romantic archetypes, of narratives in which the “bad boy” is thrilling, even admirable, before he “crashes and burns.” The move compresses a Nazi tattoo, a domestic-violence allegation, and a pattern of explicit online behavior into a category the audience already knows how to process emotionally — and, crucially, already knows how to forgive. What the frame does not permit: it cannot describe the conduct as what it is, because the dating frame makes the conduct the thing that makes the bad boy exciting. The piece needs the romantic archetype more than it needs accuracy. The piece that says “I’m just making an observation about society” is the piece that doesn’t have to disclose whose interests the observation serves.
The frame announces itself as cultural commentary precisely so it does not have to declare its political interest. What the reader receives is not “the Journal is running a hit piece on a Democratic candidate in a tight Senate race.” The reader receives “this is a thoughtful reflection on the human condition, and by the way, the evidence is Platner and Trump.” The operators I worked alongside in the cable years understood this move intimately.
Did Taylor Swift once date Graham Platner? Not that has been reported, but her songs about dissolute men do echo accounts of women who dated the Maine Democratic Senate nominee.
Frame-engineered relabeling continues with the opening question, which executes a specific rhetorical operation: it borrows Taylor Swift’s cultural authority and directs it onto a political figure. “Dissolute men” is the piece’s preferred register for a Nazi-tattooed candidate accused of abuse — not “misconduct,” not “documented pattern,” but “dissolute,” the adjective for charming rakes and lovable rogues, the word the piece needs because it lives in the same register as Swift’s lyrics. The technique’s effectiveness depends on the reader not noticing that “dissolute” and “Nazi-tattooed and accused of abuse” are different categories of problem. The frame makes them feel the same. That is what frame-engineered relabeling is built to do.
“You search in every maiden’s bed for something greater” (“Is It Over Now?”). “Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street / … Loving him was red” (“Red”). ” ‘Cause once your queen had come / You treat her like an also-ran / You didn’t measure up / In any measure of a man” (“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”).
The “as a [identity]” credibility move — WSJ §A.18; Bad-Faith Catalog: ad_hominem (positive variant — the authority of the cited voice resolves the question rather than contributing to it) — operates here through the deployment of Swift’s lyrics as diagnostic evidence. Each lyric excerpt carries a different audience segment: “Is It Over Now?” confirms the “bad boy” frame for pop-culture readers; “Red” romanticizes the archetype for the readers who already live in the dating metaphor; “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” provides the factual anchor — Platner “didn’t measure up” — for the readers who need the argument to feel substantive. The technique’s engineering is the layering: Swift’s three-decade catalogue becomes a diagnostic instrument for voter behavior, and the reader absorbs the political argument without registering that an argument is being made. This is how an editorial board uses a pop star’s cultural authority as a technique entry — not by quoting her politics, but by conscripting her feminism into service of a false equivalence she would likely not endorse.
The Nazi-tattooed oysterman doesn’t measure up in any measure of a congressman, the piece argues, yet Democratic primary voters in Maine handed him the nomination. Progressives pushed aside the state’s better-qualified governor, Janet Mills, to nominate a 41-year-old lout who exemplifies what they would call “toxic masculinity” if he were a Republican.
The “common sense” / “elite” rhetorical pivot — WSJ §A.10; Bad-Faith Catalog: frame_engineered_relabeling — operates here through the weaponization of the feminist frame against its own proponents. “Lout” is doing the work: it borrows the feminist vocabulary of “toxic masculinity” and turns it into a weapon against the feminists who coined it. The move is effective because it appears to hold Democrats to their own standard — an attractive argument for anyone who believes consistency matters. But notice what the piece does with the standard it invokes: it deploys feminist language not to critique toxic masculinity but to excuse it, to establish that the real problem is the feminists’ hypocrisy rather than the Nazi tattoo or the abuse allegation. I built versions of this asymmetry: our side’s scandals were always tactical concessions, never character indictments. The Journal editorial page treats Republican misbehavior as isolated regrettable choices; the same behavior from Democrats gets framed as systemic corruption. The hypocrisy charge is never the real argument; the real argument is always “the other side’s standards apply to them and not to us.”
They excused his misogynistic and licentious behavior. Isn’t this the sort of chauvinism that feminists have long complained about?
The rhetorical question frames the feminist movement as the real defendant, not Platner. The piece needs the audience to think about feminist hypocrisy rather than about the Nazi tattoo, because the Nazi tattoo is difficult to excuse while feminist hypocrisy is a comfortable target. This is what Bandura calls moral disengagement — displacement of responsibility: move the audience’s gaze from the thing that’s hard to defend to the thing that’s easy to condemn. The question also supplies a permission structure — “feminists are the real hypocrites here” — that lets the reader feel righteous about dismissing the misconduct rather than confronting it.
It’s true that Republicans have also looked past reprehensible behavior by President Trump and other Republican leaders. JD Vance last year excused leaders of Young Republican clubs who had sent racist, antisemitic and misogynistic messages: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes.”
Whataboutism — Bad-Faith Catalog: whataboutism — operates here through a specific structural device the board refined over decades: the both-sides deposit-and-withdrawal. The piece deposits a concession — Republicans have looked past Trump’s “reprehensible behavior” — and then immediately withdraws it by returning to Democrats. The concession is twenty-two words. The dating anecdote that follows is ninety. The ratio is the tell. This is the structural signature: a brief “yes, Republicans too” followed by an extended return to the Democratic target. The inoculation paragraph is the operator’s signature on the piece. It says: I know you might notice the asymmetry, so I’m going to pre-emptively acknowledge it in a way that lets me continue doing exactly what I was going to do. The acknowledgment is not a correction; it is a continuation. The piece concedes that Republicans do it too and then spends the next eight paragraphs documenting what “it” looks like only when Democrats do it.
The Vance quote does additional work: it normalizes the conduct as “boys being boys” — a move the piece itself will later deploy as its closing frame. The piece quotes the normalization approvingly, even while appearing to critique it.
Yes, boys will be boys, even if they are grown men. Such defenses of dissolute behavior, especially among political leaders, have contributed to its normalization.
Moral justification — Bandura: moral justification — operates through the piece’s own normalization frame, which it claims to critique while actively deploying. The move is the pivot from specific misconduct to cultural diagnosis: once the piece establishes that “normalization” is the real problem, it can discuss Platner and Trump as interchangeable symptoms rather than as specific cases with different evidentiary weights. In the abstraction, the differences between a damaged Senate nominee and a convicted president disappear. The piece claims to oppose normalization while normalizing the equivalence itself.
One could easily fill a book with anecdotes from friends about men who don’t measure up in any measure of a man. Alas, too many women tolerate such behavior, just as voters do among their political leaders. When you tolerate bad behavior, don’t be surprised when you get more of it.
Multiple-audience-targeting analytic — WSJ §A.3 (the page’s structural fingerprint) — operates through the dating-anecdote bridge, which collapses political choice into romantic choice. The anecdotes — a man on his honeymoon swiping on apps, a man greeting a date in his birthday suit, a man inviting a date lingerie shopping — do not name a single political figure; they could be anyone’s bad-date stories. They do not describe political misconduct; they describe dating rudeness. The piece needs the reader to process them as the same category of problem, because if they are the same category, then supporting Platner in a primary is like swiping right on a dishonest man, and supporting Trump is like staying with one. The technique is the category collapse, and the anecdotes are the piece’s most technically sophisticated camouflage. A reader can dismiss the political hypocrisy charge as partisan; it is much harder to dismiss a friend’s bad-date anecdote. The anecdote doesn’t ask to be political, it just accumulates. And once the reader has accepted the pattern as true in her own life, the political application follows without friction.
He calls to mind Ms. Swift’s song “Anti-Hero”: “I get older but just never wiser / Midnights become my afternoons / … I should not be left to my own devices / They come with prices and vices / I end up in crisis (tale as old as time) / … I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror / It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.”
Advantageous comparison — Bandura: advantageous comparison — operates through the piece’s closing deployment of Swift’s “Anti-Hero” as a diagnostic for both Trump and the Democrats. The lyric is doing the equivalence work: “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror” applies to Trump, and “it must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero” applies to voters who support either party’s flawed figures. The technique is the treatment of both as “antiheroes” — figures who are flawed but compelling, who keep drawing voters back despite the disappointment.
But here Swift’s lyric does something else. It lets the piece say what it could not say in its own voice: that Trump voters are exhausted, that Trump is a figure of tragic self-destruction, that the real story is the weariness of the people who keep choosing him. The lyric is the permission structure within the permission structure. It allows the piece to express sympathy for Trump voters — “it must be exhausting” — without the editorial page having to take responsibility for the sympathy. The lyric does the emotional work; the editorial page gets the credit for the literary sensibility. The piece is not saying Trump is an antihero; Taylor Swift is saying it. The piece is just the DJ. The presidential record — thirty-four felony convictions (New York, 2024), an adjudicated sexual abuse (Carroll v. Trump, 2023), a documented pattern of fraud (New York v. Trump, 2024) — is collapsed into the same category as a Nazi tattoo on a Senate candidate, and the Swift frame makes the collapse feel like cultural insight rather than political maneuvering. This is the piece’s most sophisticated operation: it conscripts Swift’s entire feminist catalogue — a body of work about the specific texture of women’s experience with specific men — into service of a both-sides political argument that erases the asymmetry the lyrics were written to describe.
Even many Republican voters are tiring of Mr. Trump’s late-night social-media outbursts, constant scheming against his enemies and relentless White House drama. He fixates on bright, blinding objects while turning away from self-reflection. Even as he ages, he never appears to learn from his blunders. He is increasingly lashing out for fear that voters will ditch him.
Moral justification continues through the technique’s most important structural move: the piece describes Trump’s conduct in the language of personal disappointment rather than in the language of accountability. “Late-night social-media outbursts, constant scheming against his enemies and relentless White House drama” reads as a list of personality flaws — annoying, exhausting, undignified — not as a list of governance failures. “Tiring” is the telling word: it borrows the register of a woman tired of her boyfriend’s behavior, not the register of a citizen alarmed by a president’s conduct. By the time the reader reaches this passage, they have been trained by seven paragraphs of Swift lyrics and dating anecdotes to process Trump’s record as the kind of thing that’s “exhausting” rather than the kind of thing that demands accountability. The frame has done its work.
This is the Journal editorial page’s version of distance — the Trump-the-antihero frame that lets the editorial board criticize the president without ever breaking with the coalition that elected him. The criticism is couched in sympathy. The criticism is also couched in a piece whose primary subject is a Democratic Senate candidate. The Trump criticism is the secondary payload; the Platner attack is the primary. The structure tells you what the editorial board actually cares about.
Voters dumped him for those reasons in 2020 for Joe Biden and the Democratic left, which came with different prices, vices and crises. Voters returned to Mr. Trump four years later, only to be reminded of all the reasons they dumped him. When will voters learn from their mistakes and stop falling for antiheroes who bring them anguish?
Threat-inflation closer — WSJ §A.13 — operates through the piece’s closing question, which executes the final move in the false-equivalence operation: it treats the choice between Platner and Trump as a single category of mistake. The closer is a symmetrical-sounding question performing an asymmetrical operation. The frame says “both sides have an antihero problem”; the structure says “the Democratic antihero problem is the one that merits 900 words of cultural commentary, and the Republican antihero problem gets a sad Taylor Swift lyric.”
So here is what the fourteen hundred words of this op-ed are actually doing, taken together.
The piece is a permission structure from top to bottom. The Swift frame gives the reader cultural cover — this isn’t a political hit job, it’s a reflection on art and life. The inoculation paragraph gives the reader fairness cover — see, I mentioned the Republican side. The dating anecdotes give the reader personal cover — this pattern is real in your own life, so the political application must be real too. The “antihero” closer gives the reader weary-wisdom cover — this is just how humans are.
Underneath all of it, the piece does one thing: it takes a Democratic candidate’s genuine liabilities and converts them into a systematic indictment of Democratic character, while treating Trump’s liabilities as a regrettable but familiar human pattern that everyone already knows about and no one needs to dwell on. The piece devotes the overwhelming share of its paragraphs to the Democrats’ flawed nominee and a handful to the president’s documented record, and calls that balance. The editorial tilts so heavily toward Platner that the Trump paragraphs read as a sigh, not a reckoning.
The asymmetry is not a flaw in the piece. The asymmetry is the piece. The Swift lyrics are not the argument; the Swift lyrics are the permission to make the argument without having to own its asymmetry. The piece borrows Swift’s voice — the voice that named specific men, that described specific textures of disappointment, that held specific men accountable for specific behavior — and repurposes it as a vehicle for a frame that collapses her specific, textured, angry, precise catalogue into a political both-sides that treats the Nazi tattoo and the felony conviction as the same kind of romantic disappointment. The piece does not expose hypocrisy; it enacts it. It conscripts Swift’s catalogue to excuse the conduct her catalogue was built to condemn. The reader who walks away feeling they’ve absorbed “both sides” has been swindled out of the capacity to distinguish a Nazi tattoo from a felony conviction — and the editorial board counts that swindle as success. The reader absorbs the con’s payload without the antidote the lyrics were written to supply.
— Phukher Tarlson