Travis Kelce is getting side-eyed for recent comments he made about Donald Trump. But is his relationship with Taylor Swift protecting him from genuine backlash?
On Tuesday, the White House announced that Trump will be attending the Super Bowl in New Orleans this coming Sunday. He’ll be the first sitting president to attend the annual game, so it isn’t surprising that various players were asked their thoughts on the matter during subsequent press conferences.
"That’s awesome. It’s a great honor," he said. "I think, no matter who the president is, I’m excited because it’s the biggest game of my life. And having the president there… it’s the best country in the world, and that’s pretty cool."
There are plenty of people who already bent over backwards trying to find ways to justify Kelce’s remarks. They’ve suggested he didn’t want to jump into political fights, or that he tried to toe the line and not offend anybody. Maybe he’s thinking about his bottom line and doesn’t want his brand deals or attempts at an acting career jeopardized. And hey, maybe we just shouldn’t be asking football players about politics at all!
But there are a number of flaws with all of these arguments. To start, Kelce has had no problems wading into topics of public interest in the past — when it suits him or his multi-million dollar podcast, anyway. That makes asking him about things that go beyond football fair game because he opened that door.
And there really is no such thing as trying to toe the line when it comes an administration that has already targeted essentially everyone other than cis straight white Christian men in the first two weeks of taking power. Declining to condemn the cult of MAGA is an implicit suggestion that everything is business as usual, at best. And calling it an "honor" to be in the presence of their leader, a convicted felon with a litany of sexual assault allegations against him, is pretty disgusting.
"Trump ripping apart the foundations of our country but Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce excited to throw a ball in front of him for a couple hours…"
"'travis kelce isn’t a trump supporter' idk if i were a famous person i’d think a little harder and come up with something other than “it’s a great honor to play for any president” when this president is destroying the democratic frameworks of our government."
"'travis kelce was media trained and—' and the media training needs to shift as the world shifts. the current media training should be nothing less than i denounce donald trump."
To be clear, Swifties seem split on the matter. Some are make excuses for Kelce while others are genuinely horrified about his complacency here.
But that there is such a notable divide here itself is jarring, considering it was only last year that Trump took to social media to declare, in all caps, "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT."
Swift’s fandom is known for swooping down and taking vengeance on any perceived wrongs against her. If it had been Joe Alwyn or Matty Healy who showed an iota of support for someone who went on a tirade against their ex, it’s difficult to imagine anyone whose online identity revolves around their love of Swift defending them.
But because Kelce is Swift’s current beau, and because they have so deftly turned themselves into this all-American couple for people to project their own fantasies onto, the Chiefs player seems to have earned some special layer of protection from their wrath.
"it's not hard to believe that someone like travis kelce would be a trump supporter but my god stand up for your girl!!!"
"The travwives putting community notes onto every piece of journalism which critiques Travis Kelce for supporting Donald Trump is truly embarrassing. What happened to this fandom exactly? Do you actually like Taylor Swift?"
"Some of you care more about Travis Kelce’s image and reputation than minorities who are actively having their lives destroyed by Trump and you should just admit it rather than gaslighting the rest of us that his statement was “neutral” when it wasn’t at all"
"imagine that your boyfriend says it's an "honor" to have the man who slanders you publicly and stand for him. oh they would never make me like you"
"She really dated one liberal man and went to two conservatives back to back. Loving him is red I guess !"
After all, if Taylor is still with him, he must be good, right?
Ultimately, Swift isn’t responsible for anything that Kelce says, just like Kelce’s proximity to her shouldn’t protect him from the consequences of his own actions. But there’s a ripple effect here, just as there has been regarding her friendship with Brittany Mahomes.
And when the result is watching a subsection of her fans defend complacency, it is, once again, difficult not to feel disappointed.
11 times J.K. Rowling did something wildly transphobic, ranked
J.K. Rowling attends day four of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 20, 2025 in Ascot, England.
This story originally appeared on Out.
For almost a decade now, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been spreading transphobia and has become the poster child for the UK’s troubling movement of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). She has gone on transphobic tirades on social media, written a nearly 4,000-word anti-trans manifesto, donated some of her fortune to anti-trans causes, regularly misgenders trans women, and gleefully celebrates every time the transgender community has their rights stripped away.
The author, once revered for creating an inclusive fantasy world where good triumphs over evil, let her LGBTQ+ fans down by consistently doubling down on her transphobic rhetoric. She has painted trans women as predators who are lying about their gender to take away women’s rights and enter women’s spaces under false pretenses. This dangerous vitriol has even caused many of the stars of the Harry Potter franchise to come forward and call her out for her anti-trans takes.
For queer and trans fans of Harry Potter, this abrupt turn was jarring and has undermined their love of a fictional world where marginalized groups are loved and fought for. But Rowling hasn’t just disappointed her fans by spreading her hateful views; she’s also done so in some of the most bizarre ways, leaving many people not just outraged, but scratching their heads.
11. Tone deaf Dolly Parton tribute
Rowling joined the world in mourning Dolly Parton by posting a tribute on X that backfired when the country music legend’s fans came out in droves to point out that Parton loved the LGBTQ+ community and wouldn’t have supported Rowling’s TERF views.
After Parton fans flooded Rowling’s comment section with messages like, “She certainly would have thought of you as a nasty, hateful woman. Nice little tweet though,” Rowling attempted to hit back after a user called her “a fucking monster” by posting, “Well, joke’s on you, because neither of us want Jolene to take our man.”
10. Accidentally wrote “f*ck up some TERFs” on a child’s drawing
Seemingly by mistake, Rowling replied to post on X about a nine-year-old kid’s drawing of Ickabog, a monster from her children’s book, by including text she likely meant to copy and paste elsewhere.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f*** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”
Internet sleuths figured out that in the post, Rowling was misgendering Tara Wolf, a trans woman accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, who was at an anti-trans protest in 2017.
9. Accused Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of being trans
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took home gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Rowling joined fellow wealthy bigot Elon Musk in spreading the rumor that the cisgender boxer was secretly a man, leaning hard into the ever-present transphobia and anti-intersex hate in women's sports.
Even after both Rowling and Musk were named in a criminal complaint filed with French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment,” Rowling refused to let it go and continued to post anti-trans posts accusing Khelif of lying about her gender.
8. Transvestigated another athlete
Less than five months after harassing Olympic boxer Imane Khelif for supposedly being trans, Rowling joined in on another transvestigation of a woman in sports when she accused cisgender Zambian soccer player Barbra Banda of secretly being a man — she is not.
Rowling took exception to the BBC naming Banda the 2024 Women’s Footballer of the Year. “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces," Rowling wrote on X.
7. Smoked a cigar to celebrate being a TERF
After donating £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 to help them fight against a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women, Rowling celebrated in a ghoulish way when the U.K. Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the court decision by posting a photo of herself with a drink in one hand and smoking a cigar with the other. While people like right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly commented “God bless you,” the post was also full of people slamming her for her cruelty in the face of people having their rights taken away. Pedro Pascal even called her out for doing “Voldemort villain s---" and referred to Rowling as a "heinous loser."
6. Accidentally turned herself into a meme
Rowling accidentally turned herself into a meme when she changed her profile pic on X to a photo that showed what looked like black mold-covered walls inside her mansion.
While the photo most likely shows wallpaper and not mold, users ran with it and began joking that the black mold had infected her brain as an explanation for her hateful anti-trans views.
5. Whined about being doxxed
On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2021, comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy protested Rowling’s anti-trans views by staging a demonstration and posting a photo holding signs in front of the author’s home near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rowling took exception to her house numbers being visible in the photo and accused the “actor activists” of “doxxing” her in an eight-tweet rant on X. But is it doxxing if the information is already public? Rowling claimed she received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them,” but both of her residences are historical landmarks, and one even has its own Wikipedia page.
4. Wrote a transphobic character that sounds an awful lot like herself
Under her pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wrote The Ink Black Heart, where a character gets harassed and doxxed because of their transphobic and racist views.
Rowling claimed that the character wasn’t based on her own experience, despite Rolling Stone writing that the character is doxxed “with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and subjected “to death and rape threats for having an opinion,” which probably sounds pretty familiar to people who have been following the author’s anti-trans outbursts.
3. Called David Tennant the "gender Taliban"
Rowling called Harry Potter actor David Tennant and people like him the “gender Taliban” in a post on X after he spoke out at the British LGBT Awards, where he called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon” and said they are on the “wrong side of history.”
In response, Rowling leaned into hateful anti-trans rhetoric that conflates being transgender with being an abuser of women. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.
2. Dared police to arrest her
Rowling spoke out against Scotland’s new hate crime act in 2024 by daring police to arrest her for misgendering trans women. The act criminalizes “stirring up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics, which can result in a fine or a seven-year prison sentence.
Rowling then went on a lengthy tirade on X — something she is known for at this point — where she accused lawmakers of protecting trans women at the expense of “the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.” She finished by telling the police to come and arrest her if what she wrote “qualifies as an offense” under the new law. “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she wrote.
1. Posted an upskirt photo
Rowling, who claims to be a protector of women and rails against trans women being allowed in women’s restrooms, targeted a transgender British podcaster who she disagrees with by posting an upskirt photo of her. Freda Wallace became Rowling’s latest target when she refused to engage with the transphobe online.
Rowling responded by misgendering Wallace and posting a photo of her originally taken by anti-trans activist and fellow transphobe Maya Forstater, from slightly below Wallace to show her upper thigh. Rowling said that Wallace refused to debate her but to prove she has “no hard feelings” she posted the photo of another debate. “I hear he left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair,” Rowling wrote.