As I’ve mentioned before, a long-ago high school classmate of mine invited me to join a hard-left Facebook page with over 68,000 followers. Naturally, I said yes. Seeing the Facebook group close has been both useful and disheartening. I get to see leftists up close and get regular proof of how utterly ill-informed and hate-driven their positions are—and how misleading. However, what depresses me is knowing that, despite all this, the DSA is winning elections in blue enclaves across America.
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A particularly good example of the type of thing that goes viral on sites such as this one is a poster celebrating Taylor Swift’s and Travis Kelce’s purported generosity, while simultaneously attacking Donald Trump for destroying a program that sends books to poor children across America.
This poster originated on the Really American Facebook page, where it garnered hundreds of thousands of likes and thousands of comments and reposts. Before I get to the original Facebook post, I want you to look only at the image, which is what most people do when they instantly like and re-share something.
The poster lovingly celebrates Taylor Swift’s and Travis Kelce’s truly extraordinary generosity to celebrate their wedding, and contrasts that with Donald Trump’s evil, Scrooge-like stinginess:
If you didn’t love them before, you will now. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce just donated $26 million to food banks, children’s hospitals, and literacy programs days before their wedding. That includes $2 million to save Dolly Parton’s free book program after Trump’s cuts froze enrollment and shut kids out. While Trump cuts, they give. Thank you, Taylor and Travis, for putting children first.
O.M.G! Aren’t those two beautiful people just, like, totally awesome? And isn’t Donald Trump the meanest, greediest person in the world, keeping all that money for himself?
Except, of course, the poster is wrong, both factually and in what it implies. All of it. Every bit of it.
Let’s start with how “generous” Swift and Kelce are. Taylor Swift is worth an estimated $2.1 billion…and that’s lowballing it. Last year, Kelce was worth an estimated $70 million…although that doesn’t include his earnings this year. In other words, the two of them have a combined net worth of at least $2.17 billion. Again, that’s the low-ball number.
With that information in hand, let’s look at just how generous Swift and Kelce really were with that dazzling, “O.M.G., don’t you just love them” charitable donation. What they really did was donate at most 1.2% of their combined fortune. In other words, what they did was akin to an average person sending a check for a few hundred dollars to the Salvation Army at Christmas. They’re not generous; they’re cheap, shallow, flashy people. Blech.
Now to specifics. What about Dolly Parton’s program “after Trump’s cuts froze enrollment and shut kids out”? That’s wrong, totally wrong.
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What really happens is that, across America, local affiliates, some public, some private, have programs that enroll children in the Dolly Parton Imagination Library program. Once enrolled, children ages 0 to 5 receive a free book per month.
Trump did nothing to affect the Dolly Parton program. It functions at the local level. For example, in 2023, Missouri took over enrolling children in Dolly’s Program. However, Missouri had to cut its program budget for fiscal year 2027. That meant freezing enrollment in the Dolly Parton program as of July 1 because there was no money for the enrollment process. It did not stop books from going to children already enrolled in the program.
Missouri’s decision also did nothing to prevent private citizens—like Swift and Kelce—from filling the budget gap. But that’s not what those two actually did. Instead, they just gave money straight to the Imagination Library to buy more books. which is a fine thing to do. As best as I can tell, the Missouri kids, who needed only $4 million to close the gap in FY2027 (0.09% of the duo’s fortune), are still out in the cold.
But here’s the most important thing: The people behind the poster know these facts. In the Facebook post accompanying the poster, they admit that the cuts were limited to Missouri and they (accurately) make no mention of Donald Trump:
The relevant part of that post states:
The donation comes just weeks after Republican lawmakers in Missouri slashed the program’s funding from $6 million to $2 million, forcing it to freeze enrollment and shut out new kids starting July 1. More than 170,000 Missouri children were signed up when politicians pulled the plug.
The same people should also know that, as noted above, while no new children can be signed up, the 170,000 children already enrolled will continue to receive their monthly books until they’re five.
In other words, the poster’s bald-faced claim that “Trump’s cuts froze enrollment and shut kids out” is completely wrong. It’s hard to believe, given the accompanying Facebook post, that the poster’s creators didn’t know that.
That erroneous statement in a viral poster tells credulous leftists that a cheap Donald Trump is stealing books from poor children, presumably to enrich himself and his cronies. The reality is that Donald Trump is acting as a steward of the American taxpayers’ money, and he’s rightly directing it to core government functions—like national defense and entitlements (the same entitlements raped into bankruptcy by fraud in Democrat-run states).
Trump understands that America is filled with people like Swift and Kelce who can keep programs such as Dolly’s going for decades…but they don’t. It’s not he who is cheap; it’s they who are. He’s doing the real charity, which is working to ensure that taxpayers save some of their hard-earned funds from a rapacious federal government, while also keeping alive the entitlements taxpayers have been forced to fund for their entire working lives.
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Image created using AI.