Donald Trump unleashed new invective at superstar Taylor Swift after she endorsed VP Kamala Harris for president.

“I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Trump posted Sunday morning on Truth Social in his trademark all-caps style, without context or elaboration.

Responding to Trump in a post on X (formerly Twitter), Liz Cheney — the Republican former congressional representative who is backing Harris — quoted his comment and wrote, “Says the smallest man who ever lived,” referencing a track from Swift’s most recent album, “The Tortured Poets Department.”

Ana Navarro, the GOP strategist and commentator who is a vocal Trump critic, posted on X, “Donald Trump has lost what little sanity he had left. Taylor Swift broke him.”

Last week, Swift posted on Instagram that she intends to vote for Democrat Kamala Harris for U.S. president following Harris’ decisive debate victory over Trump on Sept. 10. Swift’s Instagram Story linked to the U.S. government’s Vote.gov, driving more than 400,000 visitors to the voter-information site in a 24-hour period.

“I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them,” Swift wrote in the IG post in part. “I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”

In her post, Swift also called out Trump for previously using a fake, AI-generated image of her to make it appear that Swift was endorsing him.

Trump once expressed admiration for Swift, at least for her appearance. “I think she’s beautiful — very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented,” he told Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh in the book “Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass.”

Following Swift’s public backing of Harris, Trump claimed, “I was not a Taylor Swift fan” and said “she’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace.” During a call in to Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” show, the ex-president instead praised Brittany Mahomes, who is married to Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. Patrick is friends and teammates with Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, and Swift and Brittany Mahomes were photographed hugging each other at the U.S. Open tennis tournament earlier this month in New York.

“Well I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better. If you want to know the truth. She’s a big Trump fan. I was not a Taylor Swift fan,” Trump said, when asked about Swift’s endorsement for Harris. “It was only a matter of time. You couldn’t possibly endorse Biden. But she’s a very liberal person. She seems to always endorse a Democrat and she’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace. But I like Brittany. Brittany is great. She’s the one I like much better than Taylor Swift. Wife of the great quarterback. I think she’s terrific.”

In recent days, the Republican presidential ticket has decided to promote incendiary lies about a roughly 15,000-person immigrant community in one small Ohio city.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance introduced this line of messaging Monday, when he declared that “Haitian illegal immigrants” are “causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” and that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

Every aspect of this claim was untrue. The Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, consists overwhelmingly (if not entirely) of legal US residents. And there is no evidence whatsoever that any pets have recently been abducted in Springfield, let alone ingested; local police and authorities say they’ve received no reports of such animal abuse.

Nevertheless, other GOP senators and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee immediately amplified Vance’s claim. Subsequently, the GOP vice presidential candidate told his followers on X that in Springfield, “a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”

This was also untrue. Vance was referring to the death of 11-year-old Aiden Clark (which the Trump campaign had previously publicized). But Clark was not murdered. Rather, he died in a car crash in which a Haitian immigrant who had no driver’s license crashed into a school bus. Clark’s father has begged the Trump campaign to stop exploiting his son’s death to spread hate.

Then, at Tuesday’s presidential debate — on the largest political stage of this campaign season — former President Donald Trump reiterated his running-mate’s falsehoods, saying, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

There is nothing new about Trump fomenting xenophobia for political gain. The Republican has been agitating for Muslim bans and mass deportation for nearly a decade. Yet the GOP ticket’s libelous campaign against the Haitian community of Springfield is distinctly pernicious.

Trump’s demonization of entire categories of immigrants is dangerous. But when he advocated for a Muslim ban during his first presidential run, he did not direct his followers’ anxiety and loathing toward worshippers at one particular mosque or community.

With this new smear, Trump and his running mate are fomenting hatred for a discrete group of 15,000 people in one location. This dramatically increases the risk that their campaign of dehumanization will lead to acts of violence. And indeed, on both Thursday and Friday, Springfield was forced to shutter its public schools and municipal buildings in response to bomb threats. Meanwhile, a Haitian community center in the city is getting threatening calls and Haitian families are keeping their kids home out of fear for their safety.

The juxtaposition between the victimization of such innocents, and Republicans’ gleeful dissemination of AI-generated cats that are purportedly imperiled by the existence of Springfield’s Haitians, is morally nauseating, at least to any person who believes in the equal dignity of all human life. And the fact that Vance has implored his social media followers to keep spreading such libelous memes, at the expense of his own constituents’ safety, is similarly disgraceful.

Yet all this raises the question: Why do Trump and Vance believe it is in their interest to advertise such moral bankruptcy and recklessness?

The Republican ticket’s foray into inciting ethnic hatred in a single municipality cannot be understood as unthinking or impulsive. Sure, Trump routinely makes demagogic statements that are inspired less by political calculation than whatever he happened to just witness on Fox News.

But Vance is nothing if not a ruthless and self-disciplined striver. One does not rise from his humble origins to Yale Law School without some ability to filter one’s thoughts or rationally pursue one’s goals. And a person capable of likening Trump to an opiate in 2016, and then becoming an apologist for his insurrection just a few years later, when that posture became politically useful, is plainly willing to do most anything in a calculated bid for power.

Vance did not smear the Haitian community of Springfield just once. He chose to double and triple down on that smear, reiterating it again in an X post on Friday morning, in which he blamed Haitian immigrants for bringing “communicable diseases” to Ohio (without presenting any evidence to substantiate that timeless nativist trope).

So why would a ticket with strong incentives to project moderation and reassure swing voters choose to direct hatred against a small community, even after their words have already yielded bomb threats?

I suspect the ugliness is the point.

Republicans have a large advantage on the issue of immigration. In the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll of the likely electorate, voters favored Trump over Kamala Harris on immigration by a 53 to 43 percent margin. That finding is consistent with other national and battleground state polls.

Surveys of Americans’ views on immigration policy tell a similar story. In Gallup’s polling, for the first time in 20 years, a majority of Americans say they want immigration decreased, while just 16 percent say they want it increased. A recent Axios/The Harris Poll survey found a majority of voters voicing support for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

If voters choose to back the candidate who best represents their perspective on immigration, Trump will win in a landslide. From this, it follows that the more that voters are thinking about immigration come Election Day, the better off Trump and Vance will be.

Getting the media to focus on any given issue or storyline over others is not easy. Yet precisely because Vance’s attack on Haitian immigrants in Springfield is so incendiary, it has generated great quantities of media coverage.

What’s more, because Trump and Vance’s behavior is so repugnant to liberal values, it has provoked Democratic politicians and commentators into advertising their sympathy for immigrants and concern for their welfare.

The calculation here is that it could nudge a swing voter rightward, even if they find Vance’s conduct off-putting. That voter can disapprove of Vance’s cat memes and still glean from the conversation around them that Republicans are the party that’s harsher on immigration.

The Republican ticket, if this reading is correct, is betting that voters are looking for someone who can get an ugly job done. The health of our republic, and the safety of its most vulnerable residents, depends on this being a mistake.

The artificial intelligence-generated image of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump, which the singer said inspired her to endorse Kamala Harris for president this week, came from an unlikely place. 

The image, which caused controversy in August after being shared by the former president on Truth Social, originally circulated with text reading, “Taylor wants you to vote for Joe Biden,” and was posted in a pro-Biden Facebook group with just 8,000 members in December 2023. That post was viewed by NBC News. A reverse-image search conducted by NBC News did not find any earlier incidences of the image being posted online.  

After the pro-Biden image featuring the AI-generated Swift was first posted on Facebook, it began to travel around the pro-Biden internet, particularly among Gen X and baby boomer supporters of the then-candidate. The Facebook group it was initially posted in is largely a place for Democrats to share memes and information in support of Biden and against Trump. 

The image also traveled to X and Instagram’s messaging platform, Threads. S. E. Hinton, author of “The Outsiders,” shared it on X in December. It was posted in a liberal subreddit the same month.

“I am a Boomer for Biden,” one X post of the image was captioned in January. 

The image’s creator, a Democrat, asked NBC News to keep his identity private, wanting to avoid backlash. Inspired by Swift’s 2020 endorsement of Biden, he said he used a generative AI platform to create an image from the text prompt “Taylor Swift as Uncle Sam,” then used Photoshop to add text over it.

On Aug. 17, around nine months after it was posted with the pro-Biden text, a pro-Trump X account with over 340,000 followers posted an edited version that read, “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.” The X account did not respond to a request for comment about whether it edited the image itself or where it came from. The next day, Trump posted a screenshot of the X post on his Truth Social account with the caption, “I accept!”

“I woke up one morning and I got a text message from somebody who sent me a picture of the altered version and said, ‘Was this you?’ I was like, ‘Yeah that’s an altered version of my original,’” the person who created the AI image of Swift endorsing Biden told NBC News in a phone interview. “I didn’t think much of it until I sat down and started looking at the news. It started blowing up from there, with people saying Taylor might sue him and I thought, ‘Holy crap, what did I do?’”

On Tuesday, after the presidential debate between Trump and Harris, Swift posted an endorsement for Harris on Instagram. In the caption, she cited the AI-generated image Trump posted as one of the reasons why she wanted to make her stance known publicly. 

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Swift wrote. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”

Swift included a link to the official voter registration website in the Instagram Story announcing her endorsement. In the 24 hours that followed, more than 400,000 people clicked the link from her account.

“I agree with Taylor that AI, when used by bad actors, can be a danger to democracy,” the AI image creator said. “If this leads to stronger regulation, I’m not only happy to comply, but I’ll be happy that it makes the world a safer place.”

The AI image creator, an artist, said he initially started experimenting with AI to stay in step with technological advancement he perceived as a threat to his career. He said he realized it could be a useful way to create political satire. 

His public Facebook group is where he posts content in support of Democrats, starting with Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 and now in support of Harris’ presidential campaign. 

“I didn’t think it would go down this way,” he said. “The intent of it was to boost support for Joe Biden because his communication was poor and his polls were low and Trump was a looming threat and I just couldn’t stand idly by.”

Kat Tenbarge

Kat Tenbarge is a tech and culture reporter for NBC News.