Cardi emerged on the scene as a people’s princess from a working-class background, and she’s been vocal on social issues, too, from New York’s city and state government to Social Security and immigration. A political junkie with an encyclopedic recollection of American presidents, she became a sought-after pundit, endorsing and interviewing Bernie Sanders and then Joe Biden as they pursued the presidency.
Then, last November, she declared she’d never do it again — for any president or hopeful. By March, she had told L.A. radio host Big Boy she wouldn’t even vote in the upcoming presidential election. She tells me she means it. “I don’t fukk with both of y’all nikkas,” she says of Biden and Trump. Before, she had seen Trump as a dire threat, but under Biden, she’s felt “layers and layers of disappointment” from what she sees as domestic and foreign mismanagement. The cost of living is too high, wages are too low, and too little is being done about it, she says. “I feel like people got betrayed.”
“It’s just like, damn, y’all not caring about nobody,” she says. “Then, it really gets me upset that there is solutions to it. There is a solution. I know there’s a solution because you’re spending billions of dollars on any fukking thing.”
After President Biden insisted the U.S. could fund both Israel and Ukraine in their respective wars against Gaza and Russia in October, Cardi spoke out against it. She echoes the sentiment with me, but is concerned artists of color can get “blackballed” for talking about the war in Gaza. “[America] don’t pay for endless wars for countries that have been going through shyt for a very long time,” she says. “There’s countries [where] kids are getting killed every single day, but because the [U.S.] won’t benefit from that country, they won’t help. I don’t like that America has this superhero cape on. We never did things to be superheroes. We did things for our own convenience.”