Comedian Bill Maher suggested it is time Taylor Swift grew up as he slammed her songs and predicted Travis Kelce will dump her.
The elderly comic offered his analysis while chatting to 23-year-old Hailey Welch, better known as the ‘Hawk Tuah Girl, on the Monday edition of his Club Random podcast.
‘He’s gonna dump her, though. You know that,’ he told his young guest.
‘With her, it’s like the Gatorade at the Super Bowl, you know you’re gonna get dumped,’ he added. ‘You just don’t know when.’
Swift, 34, has been dating the Kansas City Chiefs tight end for nearly a year, speaking publicly about their relationship for the first time in an interview with Time in December 2023.
The Fearless singer appeared in the stands at more than a dozen Chiefs games last season, cheering him to victory in February’s Super bowl.
But her fangirl support did not impress the 68-year-old talk show host, and he predicted it would not impress her boyfriend either.
‘I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but the whole thing with the football player,’ he grumbled.
‘I just felt like 35 was a little old to be like, ‘My boyfriend’s a football player and I wear his jersey to the game with his number on it!’ Right? I mean, come on.’
Welch shot to fame over the summer after she used the term ‘hawk tuah’ to describe spitting as part of a sexual act during an on-street interview that went viral, and she protested that Swift should do ‘whatever makes her happy’.
But she speculated that the superstar might stay true to form and write another smash hit album about her relationship.
The breakdown of her relationship with singer songwriter John Mayer produced one of her biggest hits in 2010’s Dear John, and she has gone on to pen reminiscences about exes including Jake Gyllenhaal, Joe Jonas and Harry Styles.
‘It won’t be ‘f*** John Mayer’ no more, it will be ‘f*** Travis,’ Welch joked.
‘That was a long time ago,’ Maher replied, ‘Is she still singing about that?’
And he said writing about one’s personal life is ‘very tacky’.
‘You can’t control what the muse dictates to you. She’s a songwriter. I can’t fault her for that,’ he added.
‘But it does seem like such a recurrent theme. At some point, you just wanna say, maybe you should write a song called ‘Maybe It’s Me’.’
The liberal comedian was full of praise for Swift’s album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ when it was released in April, describing it as ‘Something for the Swifties, and something for the not-so-Swiftie’.
‘Everybody loves it,’ he raved. ‘The tweens love it, the teens love it, the millennials love it.’
And he warned Republicans that the Grammy award winning singer could cost them November’s presidential election if she endorses the Democrats as she did in 2020.
‘This is a person who could literally swing the election,’ he said on his Real Time podcast in February.
‘I don’t know what that says about this country, but I would just say to the MAGA people, ‘You should be very careful attacking her because this is someone who transcends parties.’
The singer sparked a surge in voter registration after encouraging her 272 million followers on Instagram Stories to get involved in September last year.
‘I mean, this is a country girl, right?’ Maher reflected.
‘ She started out as a country artist. She’s a white girl from Pennsylvania, I think, grew up on a farm, right? Never had a Black boyfriend.
‘You know, if ‘MAGA’ is full of racists, then they got to like that.
‘Her voters perhaps are not registered at all, and she doesn’t have to say who she’s voting for. All she has to say is get registered. They know who she’s voting for.’
