Taylor Swift Fans Think She Celebrated Scooter Braun’s Retirement With a Diss Track Mashup

Taylor Swift still can’t say “forgiveness is the right thing to do” with a straight face.

Swifties believe the pop star celebrated the birthday and retirement of sworn nemesis Scooter Braun during the surprise song portion of her Eras Tour stop in Cardiff, Wales on June 18. Dressed in an orange version of her acoustic set dress, Swift performed a mashup of two of her notable diss tracks: Lover’s “I Forgot That You Existed” and Reputation’s “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” This marks the second time she’s performed the 2017 banger on her tour.

“Happy Birthday Scooter,” one Swiftie commented on a fan-recorded video of the performance, which included Swift’s hearty laugh in the face of forgiveness from “TIWWCHNT.” Another fan commented, “That laugh was so genuine, I love that for her.”

Taylor Swift performs a surprise mashup on June 18, 2024 in Cardiff, Wales.

Shirlaine Forrest/TAS24/Getty Images

Swift and Braun’s fraught history plaid out in the public eye after the controversial music manager purchased her masters in 2019, inspiring the artist to re-record her first six albums. At the time, Swift called the sale her “worst-case scenario,” due to Braun’s “incessant, manipulative bullying” during her tumultuous feud with his top client Kanye West in 2016.

“Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it,” she wrote of Braun in an emotional Tumblr post in 2019.

One day before Swift’s Cardiff performance, Braun announced he’d be retiring from personal music management after 23 years (he will still be working as CEO of the entertainment company Hybe America). In a lengthy Instagram message, he said he came to the decision after losing one of his “biggest clients” and taking “some hits” to his personal life. “We had been through so much together over the last decade, but instead of being hurt, I saw it as a sign,” Braun wrote in his post, likely referencing longtime client Justin Bieber. “You see, life doesn’t hand you YOUR plan, it hands you GOD’s plan. And God had been pushing me in this direction for some time.”

Swifties were already celebrating his announcement on social media when Swift appeared to join them during the Eras Tour. “Pettiness wins,” one user captioned their TikTok clip of the performance. “She is so funny for this,” another commented on a video of the full performance.

Swift released her Reputation album following her “cancellation” at the hands of West and then-wife Kim Kardashian. “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 told Time magazine in 2023 after being named Person of the Year. “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.”

In the same interview, she described the album as a “goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure,” and promised the Reputation (Taylor’s Version) vault tracks will be “fire.” Good luck, Scooter.