Let’s start with the fresh and work backwards.
Taylor Swift was in New York last night, photographed leaving Electric Lady Studios after a reported recording session with Kendrick Lamar, Common, and Jack Antonoff. Because while her personal life has dominated the headlines these days, it doesn’t mean that she’s any less professionally ambitious. Producing a staggeringly successful rom-com like TNT requires a cauldron full of essential ingredients.
One of the ingredients in the TNT love potion is success. This has been the best year of Taylor’s career – she is a cultural supernova right now, bossing not only music but movies and also sports, with America’s biggest professional sports league panting over her appearances. She is not the Cinderella of this story, she’s the CEO. It’s a reversal of the romantic trope – cold billionaire falls in love with the every-girl, there are hundreds if not thousands of books and movies and tv series written to this formula. But Taylor’s turned it all around. In her fairy tale she’s the Christian Grey, without the childhood trauma, and Travis is the one she’s luring into her red room, LOL FOREVER.
The point is, on weekdays, we find CEO Taylor at the office in New York. On weekends, CEO Taylor heads to the football game for rest, relaxation, and vitamin D. The next football game is on Christmas Day. Everyone is expecting her to be in Kansas City to spend Christmas with Travis Kelce and watch as his team plays the Raiders.
As for all this business about the ring…
During her birthday celebrations last week Taylor was seen wearing a huge new ring. I wrote about the ring speculation the other day. One of her fans posted a TikTok theorising about the gemstones – that the opal represented Travis’s birthstone and the blue topaz was Taylor’s birthstone and that led to a lot of people believing that it was a gift from Travis to Taylor.
Keleigh Teller, a very close friend of Taylor’s, like the TikTok which only added more to the story. But…what if that was a trap?
Keleigh posted this on IG stories yesterday:
It’s a direct shot at DeuxMoi because after all that TikTok speculation, DeuxMoi answered a question about the ring and whether or not it was from Travis and she posted:
“We hear that yes, it was his gift to her but was slightly less than $175K.”
You can see a screenshot of DeuxMoi’s post in this TikTok here.
For the last few weeks, if you’ve been reading my posts, especially the ones about all the rumours about whether or not Taylor’s friends are not supporting of TNT etc, I’ve been wondering whether or not Taylor’s been rat-trapping. And now Keleigh likes a speculative TikTok about whether or not that ring was a gift from Travis leading to people becoming more convinced that it WAS from Travis…
Did she do that to bait DeuxMoi – and whoever might be leaking to DeuxMoi – into posting something false and set her up to be clowned?
Taylor’s publicist Tree Paine openly called out DeuxMoi a few weeks ago. Now one of her BFFs is doing the same. Swifties are cheering like this is a knockout and, sure, it’s good gossip from the sidelines, I guess, but I’m also not sure why the heavyweight champion of the world is walking into a high school gym and stepping into the ring against a bantam fighter.
Seriously, it makes no sense to me why Taylor and her people are wasting time on DeuxMoi and they’ve never put this much energy into a media outlet like the Daily Mail that is actually evil and destructive. Unless of course DeuxMoi isn’t their real target? If you subscribe to The Squawk you know my working theory about Taylor and DeuxMoi which I wrote about here in a newsletter – and it has to do with the Kardashians, because DeuxMoi’s Kardashian-Jenner scoops are almost always pretty tight.
I mean I appreciate that Taylor’s out here trying to protect the purity of good, accurate gossip and doing her part to remind people that DeuxMoi’s information often doesn’t track, but like I said, we’re talking about one of the most famous people on the planet who has enjoyed 15 straight months unprecedented celebrity glory…and she’s tussling with an Instagram account? Taylor is the monoculture, why is she messing in the fringes?!
When the monoculture shares its spotlight, the center is widened, and borders are expanded. What was the fringe gets closer to the core. Some people might think that Taylor’s shots at DeuxMoi are a takedown, but Taylor should know that we exist now in an attention economy. And her attention could actually become an unintended investment. If DeuxMoi is smart, she’ll take this lump of coal from Santa Taylor and turn it into gold.
We’re talking about this on The Squawk too.
