Taylor Swift Is Over Her Coy Era

Taylor Swift’s summer seems to be anything but cruel: Hot on the heels of announcing her upcoming album, The Life of a Showgirl, and its attendant 97,000 vinyl variants (so far), with Travis Kelce at her side, the pair made another big announcement Tuesday. In a joint Instagram post, the couple shared news of their engagement, Swift flashing a 10-plus-carat cushion-cut diamond ring in a fairytale garden crammed with the lushest of blooms.

The message is clear: Karma is her fiance, thankyouverymuch.

Just over a month before she drops her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, and a week and change away from the Kansas City Chiefs’ season opener, Swift and Kelce have once again snatched the day’s headlines together by sharing the happy news. Don’t spend it all in one place? Nah, they seem to say, blow the bank. Scrooge McDuck the currency of happiness and success.

It’s a marked change from the past two years of Swift and Kelce’s public relationship: As the so-called dads, Brads, and Chads sniveled about seeing Swift cheering during cutaways at NFL games and complained about the star “ruining” the sport (if it’s that easy to ruin, how big of fans could they have been in the first place?) and analysts wrung their hands about the possibility of the singer being a distraction, Swift and Kelce kept their profile as low as possible for two of the world’s most famous people. Yes, they kept showing up for one another’s professional triumphs, but stepped carefully to minimize critique.

Now? They’re done playing coy. If Swift ever had an ounce of division between her work and her personal life, she set it on fire when she featured Kelce in an onstage Eras Tour cameo scooping her off the ground in the “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” intro in London, dropped dynamite on it by announcing The Life of a Showgirl on his podcast with a two-hour conversation with him and brother Jason Kelce, and then threw in some napalm for good measure by soundtracking this engagement post with “So High School,” a song she wrote about him. He’s part of her work and her life, at this point, and the world’s just going to have to live with that. Contrast that with lyrics from Swift’s 2022 Midnights track “Lavender Haze,” in which she laments that “all they keep askin’ me is if I’m gonna be your bride / The only kind of girl they see is a one-night or a wife.” (Kelce gets the questions too.) Then-Taylor waved the question off. Now-Taylor has gone full Miss Americana, donning a white silk Polo Ralph Lauren sundress with black pinstripes, complemented by Kelce’s classic navy cable-knit short-sleeve polo sweater by the same brand, and smiling huge, flashing that enormous Artifex Fine engagement ring and letting people think what they’ll think.

Even Donald Trump, who seems to have a one-sided rivalry with Swift and recently shared his opinion that she was “NO LONGER HOT” since he declared his hatred for her (Sydney Sweeney, on the other hand, was “HOTTEST,” he said, since finding out she’s a registered Republican in the wake of her American Eagle “good jeans” campaign fiasco), was forced to sigh and accept the news. A journalist broke the news to Trump as he emerged from a Cabinet meeting and asked for his reaction.

“Well, I wish him a lot of luck,” Trump said. “I think he’s a great player. I think he’s a great guy. And I think that she’s a terrific person. So I wish them a lot of luck.”

So much for Trump being “not a Taylor Swift fan” and liking apparent Republican Brittany Mahomes “much better than Taylor Swift,” as he proclaimed ahead of last year’s Super Bowl, eh?

Swift, who again wore that diamond-trimmed Cartier watch she’s been so fond of recently in the couple’s engagement photos, probably won’t say anything about it, just like she didn’t say anything about him using an AI photo of her implying her endorsement, or several of his other slams and fibs. Why should she humor it with a response? As she herself sang in The Tortured Poets’ Department’s “But Daddy I Love Him,” “No, you can’t come to the wedding.”

As she said on New Heights, her relationship with Kelce “is what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.” She bought back her masters, and now she’s owning her narrative right along with them. As her tyrannical hot girl cult pairs off one by one—Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco, Gigi Hadid and Bradley Cooper, the list goes on—Swift, too, is growing up to live the reality she’s been writing for herself all along, no apologies necessary or offered.