Taylor Swift has had the audio removed from a Team Trump TikTok after the campaign used her song august without permission, stopping the account from using that track on the platform for now.
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The video was shared by the official @teamtrump account and used a pointed caption aimed at the singer.
The post said Swift would be ‘super excited’ the campaign had used her music, and included hashtags such as #taylorswift, #maga and #august.
It also is not the first time Trump-linked accounts, or the broader White House TikTok presence, have featured Swift-related material without any public sign of approval from the artist.
Not long after the clip went live, the sound was muted, so viewers are now left with silent footage. In the U.S. version of TikTok, a message on the video reads: “The copyright owner hasn’t made this sound available in your country.”
The video had been posted four days earlier and featured President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump standing on a balcony watching fireworks with text reading, “Mood because it’s August and Donald Trump is your president.”
Earlier this year, her song The Fate of Ophelia was used in a White House TikTok upload posted in November 2025, while visuals from the Eras Tour also appeared in a post celebrating America’s 250th birthday. The Fate of Ophelia, from Swift’s 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl, was the lead single released in October 2025. The White House video featured military imagery and images of Trump and Vice President JD Vance set to the song, with Swift making no public statement about that use. In those cases with The Fate of Ophelia and the Eras Tour footage, the audio and imagery remained in place.
A separate Team Trump video posted more recently also used a version of Swift’s “Red,” and as of reporting, the audio on that video remained available.
Additionally, a Team Trump video that included Swift’s song “Father Figure” from November 2025 also had its audio removed.
Swift appears able to move quickly in situations like this because of the way she controls her music rights. In May 2025, Swift acquired the rights to the master recordings of her first six albums from Shamrock Capital for approximately $360 million. Along with her ownership of publishing rights—which she retained throughout her career—this gave her complete ownership over both the sound recordings and the compositions of her music. Unlike many major performers, she now owns both her master recordings and her publishing for her entire discography. Because she achieved this ownership after a long and high-profile legal battle with previous rights holders, she has unilateral control over how her music is used.
Because of that ownership, she does not appear to need sign-off from a label or music publisher before a platform acts on a disputed use, meaning she can move more directly than most artists. The @TeamTrump account has approximately 14 million TikTok followers and was established ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
For many musicians, pushing back when politicians use their songs at rallies or in social media posts becomes complicated by overlapping rights holders, platform agreements and licensing arrangements. Swift’s ownership structure largely removes those extra layers.
Swift publicly backed Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 presidential election. At the time, she pointed to AI-generated images that had circulated online appearing to show her supporting Trump, saying that helped prompt her decision to speak out. In September 2024, Trump posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on Truth Social after the singer endorsed Harris for president.
There was also a separate incident involving Madison Square Garden’s billboards, which had earlier been used to celebrate her engagement to Travis Kelce before later being switched to a political message.
The boards were changed to display the words ‘Trump is your president’.