Ivanka Trump, Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, and the World’s Most Layered Birthday Cake

Ivanka Trump’s daughter Arabella’s heart-shaped 13th birthday cake had four layers, but from a cultural anthropologist’s point of view, the questions and conversation it raises are so much more layered than that, involving Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Ivanka, daughter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, shared photos of the sweet treat, featuring lyrics from Swift’s song “Blank Space,” on Thursday along with birthday wishes for her eldest daughter Arabella, among a carousel of family photos including the teen on horseback, with friends, with her parents in India at a lavish celebration ahead of the Ambani wedding, and more. Kardashian, a long-time Swift nemesis, commented on the photo, writing, “Happy Birthday Arabella 🤍.” Kardashian and Ivanka are long-time pals, and celebrated Ivanka’s most recent birthday together last October, daughters in tow.

Kardashian and Swift, however? Not friends. Kardashian is the apparent subject of Swift’s diss track “thanK you aIMee” on her most recent album, with lyrics seeming to allude to Kardashian’s role in Swift’s feud with Kardashian’s then-husband Kanye West over lyrics to his song “Famous.” Swift spoke of the impact of the fiasco on her mental health in her TIME Person of the Year interview in December 2023.

“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she said. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”

The blood? It’s bad.

The birthday post is all typical mom stuff, if your flavor of mom is the super-wealthy princess of the MAGA empire, a title she is once again showing signs of embracing despite trying to distance herself from dear old dad in the past. It’s also typical teenage girl stuff to be into Swift’s music, as Arabella evidently is: The cake, in white-on-white frosting, reads “Boys only want love if its torture” (sic), lyrics from Swift’s hit song “Blank Space,” with red “13” candles aflame, signifying both little Arabella’s age and Swift’s favorite number.

“Best cake for my favorite Swiftie,” Ivanka wrote on a photo of the cake, which, once sliced into, oozed bright, blood-red frosting, a replica of the cake Swift stabs in her music video for the song. A nice touch, though we have notes on what appears to be evidence of someone trying that “hack” of ramming a wineglass on top of the cake to take a portion.

Here’s where things get yarn-wall wild: Swift despises Donald Trump. Donald Trump, however, doesn’t seem to realize this. In an interview excerpted from the recent book Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass, Donald Trump gushed about how good-looking Swift is, saying the word “beautiful” five times in a quote, but with the caveat that “I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump.” (Yes, he referred to himself in the third person.) He went on to wonder, “But she is liberal, or is that just an act?”

No, she is “probably” not a fan, nor is her political ideology “just an act,” judging by a stream of tweets Swift sent out in May 2020, including one reading, “After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’??? We will vote you out in November. @realdonaldtrump.”