Beyoncé's Harris Rally performance is sure to get under Trump's skin

This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 24 Episode of “The Beat with Ari Melber.”

Presidential campaigns try to reach voters in every way possible: rallies and news interviews for the faithful, or advertisements, direct mail and other methods to reach people who don't follow politics and news.

Donald Trump has long used PR tactics and celebrity to burnish his brand, and it clearly bothers him when those same celebrities and artists favor his opponents over him. He has relied on this in election campaigns for years.

“We don’t need Jay-Z or Beyoncé,” Trump told a crowd in Michigan in 2016. “We don’t need Jon Bon Jovi. We don’t need Lady Gaga.”

However, Trump was clearly rattled this year when he lost Taylor Swift's endorsement to Kamala Harris, and subsequently declared that he “hated” her – the kind of instinctive reaction to rejection familiar to anyone with high school experience. Meanwhile, his eldest daughter appears to be a Swiftie, making new headlines and appearing in a show in the home stretch of the campaign.

Since entering the presidential race, Harris has received far more high-profile endorsements from entertainers than Trump. On Thursday, the vice president hosted a star-studded rally in Atlanta that included Bruce Springsteen, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee and Tyler Perry.

Musicians and celebrities have long been part of presidential campaigns, but now they're even more important because they can reach their fans directly online. The Swift endorsement was accompanied by a voter registration call that directly led to over 400,000 visits to Vote.gov in less than 24 hours.

Earlier this week, Eminem rallied for Harris in Detroit, where he is far more popular than any other politician. The vice president's campaign hopes the endorsement will help boost voter turnout in the rapper's hometown.

But one artist has risen above almost all the others: Beyoncé. Her song “Freedom” became the Harris campaign’s anthem – with approval, of course. Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z have previously supported Democrats. In 2008, she had the special role of singing “At Last” at President Barack Obama's first inauguration ball.

Although Beyoncé allowed the vice president to use her music on the campaign trail, she has yet to actually perform with Harris. In August, rumors that she might appear at the Democratic National Convention made a splash in political and pop culture news after the website TMZ announced that she would appear. These rumors turned out to be false, but the speculation immediately caused an uproar.

The cultural and political impact of Beyoncé's personal campaign for Harris is widely seen as enormous. With over 300 million, she has more Instagram followers than Swift. Their tours reveal a remarkably dedicated fan base – the new one, the “Renaissance World Tour,” has reportedly boosted the U.S. economy by $4 billion.

And now, after all the intrigue in this crucial home stretch, the Harris campaign has announced that Beyoncé will appear in person with Harris at a rally in her hometown of Houston on Friday. The appearance is already making headlines and generating excitement that the campaign sees as crucial to its voter turnout efforts across the country. Among other important campaign developments, outlets are already reporting the news.

As Beyoncé says in the title song of the year: “I keep running / Because a winner doesn’t give up.”

Ari Melber

Ari Melber, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, author and attorney, is the host of “The Beat with Ari Melber,” which airs nightly at 6 p.m. ET on MSNBC. He also serves as chief correspondent for MSNBC and legal analyst for NBC News. Before joining MSNBC, Melber practiced as a First Amendment lawyer and served as legal counsel in the U.S. Senate. He received a JD from Cornell Law School and is a member of the New York Bar Association.

Allison Detzel contributed.