Clawing their way to the top: how cats took control of the 2024 election

Last night, the most significant endorsement of the 2024 presidential election came from Taylor Swift. In an instagram post featuring a photo of the superstar holding her cat Benjamin Button, Swift wrote, “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”
She signed the caption, which she shared with her 283,000,000 followers, “With love and hope, Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”
“Childless Cat Lady” is a reference, of course, to JD Vance’s statement from a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson in which he said that the U.S. is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Swift’s delayed clapback to that remark came just moments after the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. During the debate, Trump claimed that immigrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he said. Which is, I think we can agree, a pretty weird thing to say on national television, although pretty much par for the course on social media.
Now, you might be thinking, “There sure seems to be a lot of discussion around cats during this campaign season.” And what if I told you that’s not a coincidence?
Walk with me, won’t you, over to my board covered in grainy photos and red string, and I’ll show you that Trump’s assertion that cats are being eaten in Ohio and Benjamin Button’s prominence in Swift’s endorsement of Harris and Walz can be tied directly to the 2019 feature film “Cats,” starring who?
That’s right. Taylor Swift.
Swift, I think, would like us to forget that she was in the film version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, given the movie has a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and score of 32 out of 100 on Metacritic. But I will never forget her performance in “Cats.”
Every second of “Cats” circa 2019 is seared into my temporal lobes. It is the most upsetting and unintentionally hilarious piece of media I’ve ever consumed. I saw it three times in the theater with fellow hecklers and it somehow got worse and also better every time. The human faces attached to the uncanny digital furry bodies were fuel for nightmares, and nothing that happened in the film made any sense at all. It was a real embarrassment for every actor involved, as much as they tried to laugh it off. More importantly, it was an embarrassment for cats everywhere.
It is my belief that the mockery of the Tom Hooper movie and the fallout for our feline friends ushered in an alternate global, cat-centric reality while cats sought their revenge. Which, I believe, explains why the past five years have arguably been the weirdest in American history.
Mere months after the theatrical release of “Cats,” COVID-19 hit American soil and the world shut down. You know what went up during the pandemic? Cat adoptions. In 2020, one-third of Americans welcomed a new pet into their homes. Thirty-two percent of those Americans brought home a cat, and 14% brought home both a cat and a dog. Interesting.
In 2020, petless presidential incumbent Donald Trump ran for reelection against the Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Biden won the election and moved into the White House. Do you know who else moved into the White House a short time later? Willow the cat. Interesting.
Of course, it wasn’t Willow who made international news. Biden’s German Shepherd, Commander, with his propensity for biting Secret Service agents, hogged all the headlines. And the cats couldn’t have four more years of that. So what did they do? Biden suddenly dropped his bid for reelection. INTERESTING.
Are you going to look me in the eyes and tell me this isn’t all part of cats’ plan for world domination? You can’t.
Now, seven weeks out from the election, the cats aren’t even trying to hide the ways in which they are controlling the timeline. Cats are everywhere, on the tips of everyone’s tongues, and that was their plan all along. They’re recruiting our pop stars. They’re invading our X feeds. And they won’t stop their pursuit of global domination until we apologize for laughing so hard at their movie.
Maybe I’m OK with them taking over. I could be purrsuaded that a future under their reign could be, well, clawsome. But I’d still like to course correct, so I’m off to give “Cats” five stars on Letterboxd.