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At the sold-out final stop of Cardi B’s 35-show arena tour—the highest-grossing debut arena tour by a female rapper—former President Jimmy Carter’s daughter was in attendance. She was at the Atlanta stop not just to see Cardi perform, along with the thousands of others who’ve come to her “Little Miss Drama” tour this year; she had brought with her a personally signed copy of her dad’s 2010 book White House Diary. He had signed it for Cardi before his death in 2024, his daughter waiting for the chance to meet her with gift in hand. “This is Jimmy Carter’s signature,” Cardi said after the show, clutching the book to her chest. “Can you believe that shit?”
Amy Carter is an unlikely member of the Bardi Gang, but Cardi’s fascination with politics and history is well documented. “I love government,” she told GQ in 2018. “I’m obsessed with presidents. I’m obsessed to know how the system works.” Her favorite president is, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “He’s the real ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” she said in the GQ profile. “If it wasn’t for him, old people wouldn’t even get Social Security.”
In April, Cardi finished off her tour, cementing herself as one of the most in-demand rappers around. She sold more than 450,000 tickets and is the first female rapper to sell out consecutive shows at Madison Square Garden, in New York, and the Kia Forum, in Los Angeles. Her 2025 album, Am I the Drama?, was guaranteed platinum before it was even released. It immediately hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album charts. She seems to have relegated Bia to the Khia asylum with just one song.
Her audience was less compelled by politics, drawn instead by something both more nebulous and more powerful: her values.
At her D.C. show last month, her audience was full of fans much like Amy Carter: people who love her music but also really dig her vibe. Sixteen-year-old Sydney Walker came with her mom and a 2000s-era digital camera and was vibrating with anticipation for Cardi’s performance. “She doesn’t let people belittle her. She always has something to say to defend herself,” she said. “She’s just strong and powerful and catchy, and yeah! I just love her!”
Cardi’s tickets, which cost anywhere from a few hundred bucks to several thousand dollars, were pricey enough in Washington that most of the audience were women in their 30s and 40s, the kinds of people who can afford a $500 seat in the nosebleeds. Dressed in schoolgirl miniskirts, homemade tees with Cardi’s face emblazoned on the front in rhinestones, business-casual tube tops and go-go boots, her audience was less compelled by politics, drawn instead by something both more nebulous and more powerful: her values. “I like that she’s aware on political views and political statements,” Walker’s mother, Chandra Walker, said. “I really have no idea what Cardi B’s political views are, but I assume they’re not to that particular side, or my daughter would have an issue with it.”
It’s that same spirit that brings a member of the Carter family to a show, or that makes her 164 million Instagram followers listen with rapt attention when the star talks about inflation, as she did in 2023. “Lettuce was, like, $2 a couple of months ago, and now it’s, like, fucking $7,” she said. “If I think that shit is crazy, I can only imagine what middle-class people, or people in the hood, is motherfucking thinking!”
But it’s not just internet pablum that Cardi’s offering, obvious statements about how food is expensive or how rent is too damn high. In 2019 she sat down with Bernie Sanders at a nail salon in Detroit to talk about capitalism and universal healthcare. She spent much of the previous election stumping for Kamala Harris, reading off her phone, “Trump says he’s going to protect women whether they like it or not,” before screaming, “I DON’T WANT IT!” In April, right before performing at Madison Square Garden, she announced universal 2-K childcare for New Yorkers with Mayor Zohran Mamdani. This month, she’ll be judging a jingle competition for the mayor’s office.
From her beginnings as a principled stripper to her time as the most interesting and viral character on Love & Hip Hop, Cardi has always found a way to sidestep any real controversy and explain herself in full. Even when she’s sued—as she was in 2018, when a security guard alleged that the rapper had assaulted her—she wins, both literally (the suit was dismissed) and culturally (she turned her memeified face into collector’s album covers of the latest record). Female artists like her sometimes fall victim to a lousy husband, a music industry that doesn’t reward them, or, sometimes, poorly conceived political stances. Cardi has, despite all the odds stacked against her (and we know all about them because she tells us so often and so clearly), avoided so many of the typical crises that befall famous women like her. Somehow, everyone is rooting for this girl from the Bronx to become the most successful female rapper around.
It took Onika Maraj a decade and a half to become Nicki Minaj; at just 33 years old, Cardi has found her footing in half that time, and often through a political bent that remains on message, improbably down-to-earth (at least for a woman rumored to be worth more than $80 million), and very funny. Wealth and fame tend to cloud perspectives of politics, economics, and cultural shifts. Cardi has managed to evade controversy mostly by meaning what she says, no matter her income bracket. You can’t guilt her into a Notes App apology; unlike other celebrities, she has opinions about everything and remains unguarded enough to share them.
“Bitch,” Cardi said at her opening night in Palm Desert, California, in February, “if ICE comes in here, we’re gonna jump their asses. I’ve got some bear mace in the back! They ain’t taking my fans, bitch.” In response, the Department of Homeland Security’s X account posted: “As long as she doesn’t drug and rob our agents, we’ll consider that an improvement over her past behavior.” Cardi had previously talked about robbing men in hotels when she worked as a stripper as a means for survival, information the government was trotting out to attempt to humiliate her.
But it’s hard to embarrass someone who sees herself and the world clearly, especially someone who’s been talking with the same authenticity at 33 as she was at 23. “If we talking about drugs let’s talk about Epstein and friends drugging underage girls to rape them,” she replied. “Why yall don’t wanna talk about the Epstein files?”
Belcalis Almánzar, born in the early ’90s in Washington Heights in Manhattan to a Dominican father and Trinidadian mother, is no nepo baby. As a teenager, Cardi was a cashier at an Amish market before getting fired. She started stripping at 19 until her early 20s, an origin story she doesn’t shy from. “I feel like a lot of people want me to lie and be like, I hated it, I went through so much things, I don’t recommend it,” she told Howard Stern in 2018. “I don’t tell girls to go do it, but I’m not even going to front: It really saved me.” It’s a past life that Cardi could easily feel ashamed of or hide from the public entirely, considering her Birkin-wearing lifestyle. Instead, it just lends more credibility to her authenticity. Her values in her early adulthood were all about survival. What’s more relatable than just wanting to stay alive?
In Atlanta, her tour set started out with “Get Up 10,” in which she raps, “Look, you gave a bitch two options: stripping or lose … Mama couldn’t give it to me, had to get it at Sue’s.” (Cardi used to strip at Sue’s Rendezvous, in Mount Vernon, New York, now closed after 45 years in business.) In a 2016 interview, she discussed the very real conditions that sent her to strip. “I was poor as hell. I was living with my ex-boyfriend that was beating my ass, I had to drop out of school,” she said. “How was I gonna leave if I only made $200 every week?”
She was trying to break into the music scene by the time she joined the VH1 reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York in 2015. Already, Cardi was in control of her public narrative, instinctively aware of where the cameras were and how to play to them. “I’m just a regular-degular-shmegular girl from the Bronx, I be dancing all around America, hosting all around America, and my goal is to make that shmoney and turn everything up,” she said in her introduction. No longer stripping, Cardi was portrayed as a young woman still finding poise while also rejecting whatever was expected of her. In Season 6, she goes to an etiquette class, taking it about as seriously as it deserves: “Oh, it’s lovely,” she said of her tea in a fake British accent, before cackling uproariously and saying her nails are too long to hold the cup by its handle.
She speaks through the lens of someone who hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be broke, or the fact that other people still are.
There were plenty of rap B- and C-list celebrities on Love & Hip Hop while Cardi was on the show—Yandy Smith-Harris, Erica Mena, Remy Ma, Joe Budden, and Amina Buddafly, all of whom were more established in the music industry than Cardi. Somehow, she still got away with throwing a shoe at a reunion taping and screaming “WHAT WAS THE REASON, BITCH?” at a co-star who said she didn’t like her. She ends up being the voice of reason in a love triangle between two women and their dishonest partner. “Men like you need to get used,” she says to Peter Gunz, who otherwise kept escaping any real accountability for cheating on the mothers of his many children. “Have more respect for them. This is how you show your daughters how women should get treated?” None of it is behavior that seems out of the norm for present-day Cardi. The same energy she gave to Gunz is how she talked to organizers of the Atlanta show earlier last month when she said she was mistreated by the staff.
Fame and money came quickly after Love & Hip Hop. By 2017, she was dating Offset, one of the members of Migos. She had her first child with him in 2018, the same year she released her debut album, Invasion of Privacy. But she might have gotten the most press around that time for her plastic surgery, from breast augmentation to butt injections. It was her dental work, though, that marked the first big shift toward real fame and significant wealth. Even in “fixing” her teeth, she was criticized for changing herself when the money came. “People used to talk about my teeth all the time,” she said in 2017. “And now they’re talking about my boobs. I can’t please everybody.” Instead of hiding from rumors about plastic surgery, or pretending as if she couldn’t afford a little personal enhancement, she rapped about it in her breakout 2017 hit “Bodak Yellow.” It’s a song about making money—this time not by stripping but through her own agency, a way to take care of herself and also her entire family. “And I pay my mama’s bills,” she raps. “And I just checked my accounts, turns out I’m rich, I’m rich, I’m rich.”
And so when Cardi does engage with politics, as she often does, she speaks through the lens of someone who hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be broke, or the fact that other people still are. “Y’all thought that [Trump] was gonna be y’all hero—he don’t fucking like you,” she said last fall. “He ain’t for you. And now ain’t no fucking food stamps. Y’all motherfuckers are going to have to hunt raccoons and shit for Thanksgiving.” It’s a powerful kind of sincerity from someone who yanked herself out of poverty and refuses to conceal the way she got there. Her 2019 interview with Sanders reflects someone who wants things to be easier for others than they were for her. “When I was not famous, I just felt like, no matter how many jobs I got, I wasn’t able to make ends meet,” she tells the senator. “What are we gonna do about wages in America?”
Relatability is a key selling point for almost all forms of female celebrity. And hey, what’s more relatable than a famous woman married to a guy who sucks?
Engaged to Offset in 2017 and secretly married the following year, she revealed her pregnancy in 2018 on her Saturday Night Live debut. They broke up at the end of that year following months of rumors that Offset was cheating. Weeks later, he interrupted her set at Rolling Loud Festival in L.A., bringing out three boxes of flowers that spelled out Take Me Back Cardi, an estimated $15,000 display. Cardi looked irritated at the time, and fans pleaded with her online to walk away and never look back, but they reconciled by 2019. By 2020 she filed for divorce, then called off the divorce, before having another baby in 2021 and again in 2024. The ride was rocky, but fans had no need to consult the tabloids about her marriage. She rolled out the tumult of her relationship mostly on her own social accounts.
Things were sour again by 2025, and she responded to Offset’s request for spousal support online. “Word to my mother: I want you to die. But I want you to die fucking slow,” she said. “I want you to die slow in the bed. And when you die … you gotta think of me.” She posted on X that Offset was allegedly harassing and stalking her, threatening to harm himself, to harm her, and to release videos of the two of them having sex. She also claimed that he and his mom had robbed her at the beginning of the year, that he didn’t buy their kids anything for Christmas, and that he was refusing to sign the divorce papers.
Cardi still says she’s the sole provider for their three shared children; money, again, is not a conversation she avoids. Last year, she detailed all her kids’ expenses: $45,000 private school, $300 piano lessons, gymnastics, boxing classes, $3,000 to her cousins to babysit her older kids, hundreds in nanny fees, and a personal chef for the children from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. But despite her newfound economic bracket, her kids seem to be raised like a lot of first-generation immigrant kids are, with some pressure to perform academically and “mandatory” tutoring four times a week after school. “There’s things I cannot do that I want my kids to do,” she told Jay Shetty in a 2025 interview. “I want you to be a hundred-times-better version of me. I’m going to install that in you.”
Last year, after her divorce, Cardi had her fourth child, this time with New England Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs. While they were public together as a couple, Diggs had three more children with three other women the same year Cardi gave birth to their son. It was another unorthodox life event that Cardi addressed directly, and not too seriously. “That’s your baby daddy, bitch. That’s my baby daddy too, girl,” she said while preparing dinner for her family. “Well, what now? I don’t fucking know. We’ll figure it out, bitch.” While some criticize her for having so many kids across different fathers, she’s upfront about her spending in a way that makes it clear she can afford these children, with or without their dads.
In Cardi, both the NFL and Diggs got a publicity boost. Cardi wasn’t just his girlfriend but a kind of mascot, going to his games and sitting with Patriots owner Robert Kraft in his private booth, a WAG type for anyone who doesn’t care for Taylor Swift. It should have been Diggs’ time at the Super Bowl in February—new baby (babies?), a girlfriend far more famous and perhaps even richer than him, and an opportunity to win a championship ring. Instead, attention was all on Cardi when she gave him a terse “good luck” through reporters before the game, barely masking her disdain for him.
And after all that? Diggs lost the Super Bowl.
A nontraditional family structure is just more commonality between her and her fans. Around 17 percent of children in the U.S. live in blended families, predominantly with a mother and stepparent, or a mother and half-siblings. Hating the fathers of her children, too, is just another way to be relatable. Her audience isn’t necessarily interested in her taking the high road. Cardi engages in politics in a direct way, yes: by speaking to politicians, by rapping to “all my hoes who wear the pants like Kamala,” by angrily posting about Donald Trump’s restrictions on SNAP benefits. But she has also figured out the politics of hating a man who fucked up. Much of her second album, Am I the Drama?, seems focused on processing the harm done by Offset, a man she once loved. And even though she’s since been seen with Diggs again, both at her shows and later, outside a club following one of her after-parties, there’s a sense that you just can’t really fuck with her. Why would you try? She might make a whole album about you.
At her D.C. show, her line about Kamala doesn’t get much of a response. But when she raps “Call your mama and tell her she raised a bitch,” it feels as if the arena could split in half, the sheer force of 20,000 women singing it right back to her.
Before Cardi came onstage in D.C., her DJ was hyping the crowd up. “If your parents or grandparents weren’t born in the United States, I want you to make some noise,” he blared into his microphone, before playing Bad Bunny’s “Tití Me Preguntó.” (Among the last songs he plays is Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” which is received with the same gusto.)
Big arena tour notwithstanding, there are markers to remind you of who Cardi was before she became this version of herself. Preshow, the screens play an ad for her hair care line, showing Cardi wrapping her hair in a plastic takeout bag. When she emerges, she looks more like an otherworldly Beyoncé in a Maleficent-like headdress, long black coat, and sparkling thigh-high boots. But Beyoncé is purposefully unknowable; she posts only what’s highly curated and edited, she gives her audience no clear glimpse into her family turmoil beyond well-constructed metaphors in song, and her billionaire status makes her untouchable in the same way Jeff Bezos is beyond cultural reach. Her hair care line, Cécred, makes sense mostly because her mother was a hairdresser; the story of her branding is still cached in metaphors and illusions. Cardi just tells you outright who she is.
“I don’t know who Beyoncé is. The difference with Cardi is she gets on our level,” said 38-year-old Ashlen Zazycki, who came to the show from Florida with her friend. “Her social media for me is low enough that I feel like that’s my homegirl from the streets, but high enough to know that’s an A-list celebrity.”
Despite her very unrelatable wealth, Cardi still operates online like one of the thousands of women and girls who have come to this D.C. show. She’s performing for thousands, but between songs, the energy is that of sneaking into your big sister’s room to gossip. “Our backgrounds are similar. We came from the hood,” Zazycki said. “To see her come from the gutter and now she’s at Capital One Arena, 20,000 people, from Love & Hip Hop to this? It’s an inspiration to see someone can come from the same neighborhood and now they’re packing sold-out arenas worldwide.”
Cardi has found authenticity through failure and through sincerity.
For this audience, the appeal is not just the music, not just her fashion (though Zazycki admits she started wearing Fashion Nova jeans after Cardi did), and not just her personality. Cardi has found authenticity through failure and through sincerity. When she’s mad at Offset, she’ll tell you about it. Her immigrant mother mentality speaks to the other Black and brown women in attendance, who admire her stern but loving attitude toward her kids. Her politics are secondary—no one is here because of her voting record—but they do like how she takes care of her children, her community, and her own pocketbook. “She cares about women’s equality no matter what station in life they’re in. I just like that she’s a girl’s girl and she wants everyone—Black, brown, whatever—to be treated fairly,” Zazycki said. “You don’t see that with someone at her status.”
Midshow, Cardi’s DJs do a $5,000 giveaway for whoever shakes the best ass. The winner is a heavily pregnant Black woman in a sheer black bodysuit, dancing with impressive verve. It’s a hands-down victory, according to the crowd’s cheering: If Cardi can perform (and has performed) pregnant, raunchy and fun and unburdened, why can’t everyone here do the same thing?
What makes Cardi so compelling for women of all ages, but especially those in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, is the sense that her priorities are her children, her elders, and then her career. “She makes sure that everyone in her family is good,” said 54-year-old Keturah Brown. “I see her back in the Dominican Republic at her grandma’s house. She’s a new mom. I respect the fact that she’s doing what she needs to do.”
“She’s a family woman first,” said 51-year-old Malikah Arnaud. “She does what she needs to do at this point in her life in a legitimate way to take care of her family.” Arnaud also admires the way Cardi talks about immigration, namely as an Afro-Latina. “She speaks Spanish, and I love that. I married an immigrant from a West Indian country that had to work from the ground up,” she said. “She’s not just riding a wave.” After all, long before they too became mega-famous, Cardi was working with Hispanic and Latin artists like Bad Bunny, J Balvin, and Rosalía. Even New York’s mayor noticed when asked if he was a Nicki or Cardi stan.
Comparisons to Nicki Minaj are inevitable and perhaps unfair, but they’re hard to avoid; while Cardi was barking at Trump and his acolytes online and onstage, Minaj was holding hands with him. “I don’t listen to her anymore,” 16-year-old Walker said, smiling shyly at the mere mention of Minaj. “I’ve been getting more into politics even though I’m pretty young. I’m going to be upfront: I’m not a Donald Trump supporter. That’s another reason why I do like [Cardi].” But Minaj wasn’t always a fervent right-winger, and she too came from humble roots. Most artists lose grip with the reality their fan base still lives with. So far, Cardi has held on.
Cardi’s D.C. show wasn’t particularly political. While she may have mocked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while on tour in California, or come for DHS online, she remained mostly nonpolitical once in the nation’s capital. But her appeal isn’t exactly in her political bona fides, her willingness to engage directly with political candidates, or even her outright hatred of the current administration. It’s the politics of values, of what she considers important culturally. “She stands on business,” Brown said. “She preaches what she does.”
Relatability and likability index higher than Cardi’s obsession with history or keen interest in the rate of inflation. She just knows that shit is too expensive, too hard, and too unfair. “You respect these women for their decisions. I don’t look to them as political leaders. I look to them for what they are: artists and women who came to this country with nothing. And we want to see women succeed,” Zazycki said. “However you got here, you’re here. Make it happen for yourself. If that means you gotta be stripping and then become a rapper, then become a stripper and a rapper. I’ll be at your concert too.”
