Though politics and pop culture have long commingled (mainly since the days of Marilyn Monroe crooning “Happy Birthday” to JFK while bursting of a transparent gown), the turn this intermixing has taken in the years since Trump took office has increasingly zagged off the edge of the cliff called “sophisticated tie-in.” The latest and now most iconic case in point (even more so than the Boschian spectacle of Kim posing with the Orange One after buttering him up enough to convince him to release Alice Johnson or the meeting of the “minds” that took place between him and Kim’s husband) is Cardi B sounding off on what has become the longest government shutdown in history.
Taking to her Instagram account (where she often does to express her thoughts on Nicki Minaj and missing her favorite appendage of Offset but not much else about him) on the now immortal day of January 16th, Cardi speaks in the same frantic, uninformed childlike manner as the very person she’s railing against. Yet thanks to the benefit of being more endearing (and at least offering the world bops like “Twerk” instead of bombs like “grab ’em by the pussy”), Cardi’s stream of consciousness (or, more accurately, unconsciousness) led to a somehow quotable movement that even had Democratic politicians wanting to use her video as a convincing Cher Horowitz in debate class type reference point for Trump to see.
With a caption that read more than somewhat non-cohesively, alluding to both her desire to not want to risk assassination with talk of politics as well as having a new song and video out, Cardi announced, “I know a lot of ya do r watch the news so I’m letting ya know shit getting real …..I ain’t going to say nothing much tho I don’t want mofos to off me…..ANYWAYS TWERK VIDEO OUT NOW.” This set the tone for a speech that would quickly be parsed for soundbites both in news items referencing the debate about the shutdown, as well as elements of it that would be extracted for the purposes of protest signs at the Women’s March. The full transcript, in case you haven’t been made aware of its poetry is:
“Trump is now ordering as in summonsing federal government workers to go back to work without getting paid. Now I don’t wanna hear y’all mothafukkas talkin’ ’bout ‘Oh but Obama shut down the government for seventeen days.’ Yeah bitch! For health care so your grandma could check her blood pressure and you bitches could go check y’all pussies at the gynecologist with no muthafukkin problem. Now I know a lot of y’all don’t care ’cause y’all don’t work for the government or y’all prolly don’t even have a job, but this shit is really fucking serious bro. This shit is crazy. Our country is in a hell hole right now, all for a fucking wall. And we need to take this serious. I feel like we need to take some action. I don’t know what type of action, bitch, because… this not what I do. But bitch, I’m scared, this is crazy and I really feel bad for these people that gotta go to fukkin work to not get mothafukkin paid.”
And that is what it really comes down to: Cardi’s empathy for people not getting the cheese for their egg–for no one cares about collecting compensation for services rendered more than this woman (it’s a classic example of unshakeable New York hustle). Of course, no one gave a fuck about bureaucrats before this happened, when they were the easy target of any joke referencing government inefficiency and ineptitude. Yet tides have clearly turned when considering that when Trump looks into the mirror to ask not only, “Who is the most ineffectual of all,” he must also add, “Who is the most ineloquent of all?”–only to be disappointed to see that he can’t even win at that game either–Cardi B overtly out-Trumping him with her own similar rhetoric.
To that point, with signs of this weekend’s third annual Women’s March markedly referencing Cardi B’s impassioned if not completely unenlightened rant, it honestly wouldn’t be that far out of the realm of possibility for Cardi to take it as a greenlight to run for president (like Kanye) in 2020–regardless of “this not being what she do.” Neither was escaping the strip club or promoting Pepsi during one of the whitest emblems of Americana, but hey, time changes you–and, accordingly, what you’re capable of (especially when presented with the megaphone of a social media account that people actually pay attention to). At least it didn’t take her almost half of her career to finally speak her mind on politics, unlike Taylor Swift, who broke the internet by invoking increased voter registration with one mere missive.
