A Taylor Swift Song Was Featured on The Handmaid’s Tale—and Swifties Think It’s a Rebuke of Donald Trump

Well, well, well. Is Taylor Swift’s Reputation rerecording finally on its way? There was little pomp, and even less circumstance, to mark the appearance of the first single from Reputation (Taylor’s Version)—at least compared with past announcements—when it debuted back in 2023 on the Prime Video show Wilderness. But now fans think another placement may hint at an imminent Rep (TV) release date.

On May 19—eight years after Reputation, Swift’s sixth studio album, debuted—the same 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 reupped rumors that the long wait for Rep (TV) is over.

Some Swifties believe the 35-year-old masterminded the placement 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; that 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 in which 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 brain-dead 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 Trump was first elected to office in 2016, women have donned the white bonnets and red cloaks worn by the show’s handmaids 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?