Taylor Swift has finally revealed why she decided to stay silent during the 2016 presidential election. “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement,” Swift tells Vogue in a new cover story for the magazine’s September issue. “He was going around saying, ‘I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you.’ I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was, ‘She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar.’ These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”

As her one-time rival Katy Perry stumped for Clinton in 2016, Swift received widespread criticism for remaining neutral. It wasn’t until the 2018 midterms that Swift entered the fray to endorse the Democratic candidate running for Senate in her home state of Tennessee. That endorsement did not help Phil Bredesen overtake his Republican opponent Marsha Blackburn, who ended up winning the race by more than 10 points.