In an apparent attempt to undercut Taylor Swift’s potential influence on the presidential election later this year, former president Donald Trump issued a statement on his Truth Social platform Sunday claiming credit for the 2018 Music Modernization Act and stating, without evidence, that Swift would not endorse President Joe Biden’s re-election bid.
In the post, Trump claimed: “I signed and was responsible for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and all other Musical Artists. Joe Biden didn’t do anything for Taylor, and never will. There’s no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden, the worst and most corrupt President in the History of our Country, and be disloyal to the man who made her so much money. Besides that, I like her boyfriend, Travis, even though he may be a Liberal, and probably can’t stand me!”
A rep for Swift did not immediately respond to Variety‘s request for comment. However, Dina LaPolt, a key attorney behind the MMA, disputed Trump’s claims in a statement to Variety on Sunday.
“This [claim] is funny to me,” she wrote. “Trump did nothing on our legislation except sign it, and doesn’t even know what the Music Modernization Act does. Someone should ask him what the bill actually accomplished.”
While the full wording of the act, which was created to update the rights of songwriters and creators in the digital age, is available from the U.S. Copyright Office, a succinct summary can be found in a 2020 post on the Library of Congress website.
(In fact, the usually apolitical Swift has spoken out against Trump in the past, writing in Elle in 2019, “Invoking racism and provoking fear through thinly veiled messaging is not what I want from our leaders, and I realized that it actually is my responsibility to use my influence against that disgusting rhetoric.”)
Republican Congressman Darryl Issa, Chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, wrote an op-ed for Variety in 2023 enthusiastically praising the act on its fifth anniversary, writing in part: “Congress achieved that rarest of things: A consensus solution that recognized the rights of musical artists and created a way they could be compensated fairly by publishers.”
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