Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, and the Power of Being Cryptic | Opinion

Two of the most successful storytellers in the world, former President Donald Trump and singer Taylor Swift, are masters of the ancient art of cryptic communication. It’s a central reason they have die-hard fans and broad societal impact.
While the media joins in the fun of decoding Swift, they still treat Trump’s anti-democratic word salads as if they were a computer virus, not a well-designed feature.
So the media helps push Trump’s coded messages to his supporters while downplaying them to everyone else, as in POLITICO’s headline, “Trump’s ‘won’t have to vote anymore’ remark didn’t mean anything, Chris Sununu claims.” Trump’s authoritarian dog whistles to his MAGA faithful always mean something—just as Taylor Swift’s Easter eggs do for her fans—the Swifties—including Swiftie Dads like me.
For Swift, being cryptic is an explicit strategy. In her slyly self-deprecating 2022 hit Mastermind, she confessed her strategy of verbal seduction, “And I swear I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ’cause I care.” In the chorus, she sang, “What if I told you I’m a mastermind? And now you’re mine. It was all by design.” Swift, like Trump, is all about hidden meanings or references only her fans will decode. “I think the first time that I started dropping cryptic clues in my music was when I was 14 or 15,” she told Jimmy Fallon in 2021.
In politics, these are dog whistles, one of Trump’s favorite strategies, as with his 2016 jab about Hillary Clinton: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”
But their original name comes from the ancient Greeks, who codified the tricks humans developed over millennia for being memorable and persuasive into over 200 figures of speech. This is known as noema, from the Greek for understanding. It’s used “to conceal the sense from the common capacity of the hearers: and to make it private to the wiser sort, who by a deep consideration of the saying, are best able to find out the meaning,” as clergyman Henry Peacham explained in his 1593 book The Garden of Eloquence.
It’s related to another figure, schematismus, which uses circuitous language to conceal meaning, where the speaker “would have it understood by a certain suspicion which he doth not speak,” Peacham explained. It’s used “when it is dangerous to speak directly and openly” or “when it is indecent to be spoken plainly.”
Swift uses both tricks in the opening lines of All Too Well, which Billboard called a “lyrical masterpiece.” She sang, “I left my scarf there at your sister’s house. And you’ve still got it in your drawer, even now.” The sister, never mentioned again, is an Easter egg, since Swifties know the song is about a famous man with a famous sister (allegedly actor Jake Gyllenhaal and his sister Maggie Gyllenhaal).
Swift later explained the scarf’s meaning circuitously. “But you keep my old scarf from that very first week. ‘Cause it reminds you of innocence, and it smells like me,” she sang. The literal meaning is cryptic. She lost this scarf—so famous even SNL joked about it—the first week she’s with the guy, and she knows exactly where it is. But then why didn’t she take it back when they were dating?
As a metaphorical schematismus, however, the meaning becomes clear. She didn’t just lose a scarf. She lost her innocence that first week. That’s why she can’t ever get it back.
And, no, Swift doesn’t expect us to believe the scarf still smells like her all these years later. So why say it? Well, “smells like” is a callback to the famous song title from Kurt Cobain and Nirvana—Smells Like Teen Spirit—which is about the same kind of lost innocence. That’s how Swift writes songs.
It’s also how Trump spins stories while sending subtle messages—and increasingly unsubtle ones, as in his recent remarks. “Christians, get out and vote just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. you know what, it will be fixed.” He repeated for extra emphasis, “We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
The media quoted experts calling this one of Trump’s “deliberately ambiguous statements that can be interpreted in multiple ways.” No, it can’t. The meaning to the MAGA crowd is unambiguous. It’s only ambiguous to those treating each new Trump dog whistle as if it’s the first one they’ve ever heard.
Swift knows her fans understand what she’s doing with the Easter eggs, too. How? “I’ve trained them to be that way,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2019. “As long as they like it, I’ll keep doing it. It’s fun. It feels mischievous and playful,” Swift said.
Trump has also trained his fans, but it’s not playful. And he can keep doing it only if we let him.
Joseph Romm was named by Rolling Stone as one of “the 100 people who are changing America” in 2009. He is senior research fellow at the UPenn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. His books include, How to Go Viral and Reach Millions: Top Persuasion Secrets from Social Media Superstars, Jesus, Shakespeare, Oprah, and Even Donald Trump. He is working on a book about Taylor Swift’s storytelling secrets.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.