Taylor Swift Debuted Reputation TV on The Handmaid's Tale—and Swifties Think It's a Rebuke of Donald Trump

Well, well, well. After years of speculation, it looks like Taylor Swift’s Reputation rerecording is finally on its way. There was little pomp, and even less circumstance, to mark the occasion of Reputation (Taylor’s Version)’s first single—at least compared to past announcements—but we’ll take what we can get.

On May 19, eight years after Reputation, Swift’s sixth studio album, debuted, the first single from the rerecording was featured in an episode of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “Look What You Made Me Do” (Taylor’s Version) immediately sent Swifties into a frenzy—and not just because the long wait for Rep TV appears to be over.

Some Swifties believe the 35-year-old masterminded the release as a direct response to President Donald Trump, who said last week, for some reason, that the superstar was “no longer hot.” Trump took credit for what he called the singer’s dip in popularity, after he said “I hate Taylor Swift” on social media back in 2024; the diss came after she endorsed his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, for president.

The collective freakout over “LWYMMD” TV discredits Trump’s theory of Swift’s declining hotness, but there’s more to it than that, according to some fans. The Handmaid’s Tale, starring Elisabeth Moss, is a show about a near-future dystopia where women are stripped of their rights and essentially reduced to nothing more than human incubators. The show is especially poignant as several states have effectively banned abortions. In fact, in the case of a woman in Georgia who is braindead but being kept alive to carry her fetus to term despite her family‘s protests, real life is mirroring the show with eerie accuracy.

Since he was first elected to office in 2016, women have donned the white bonnets and red cloaks worn by the handmaids in the show as a form of protest; could Swift’s decision to lend her voice, specifically in a scene where the handmaids are staging an uprising, be her own metaphorical red cloak costume?