America’s Paranoid Taylor Swift Super Bowl MAGA Fever Dream
A chyron on the conservative One America News Network deemed it a “massive superbowl psy-op.” The game would be little more than Democratic propaganda, showcasing what Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican Presidential candidate turned Trump booster, called an “artificially culturally propped-up couple.” (On X, the Times columnist Ross Douthat proposed that the couple should act as a “screening question,” like a Rorschach blot, for a future G.O.P. Administration: Are they “the last best hope for America” or a ploy to make N.F.L. fans “get booster shots and vote for Democrats”?)