Cardi B, the Bronx-born rapper who in November was tapped to become the the featured musical guest at the 2019 AVN Awards—making her the first woman ever to hold that position at the event—suddenly found herself trending on Twitter Wednesday evening, and she didn’t know why.
In fact, she took to Twitter to ask her fans, “Why am I trending?”
The answer, however, lay in an unlikely source: the United States Senate. Or, at least, on the Twitter accounts of three prominent Democratic senators, who debated whether they should retweet Cardi B’s latest social media video: a rant against Donald Trump and his government shutdown, a shutdown which will turn four weeks old on Friday, well surpassing the previous three-week record, to make it the longest government shutdown in United States history.
"I just want to remind y'all, because it's been a little over three weeks...Trump is ordering and summoning federal government workers to go back to work without getting paid," the superstar rapper says in the video, as quoted by The Hill. "Now, I don't want to hear y'all motherfuckers talk about 'Obama shut down the government for seventeen days'—yeah, bitch, for health care! So your grandmother can go check her blood pressure... with no motherfucking problem."
Democratic Senator Brian Schatz, 46, of Hawaii was apparently so taken with the rant that he took to his own Twitter account to muse, “Trying to decide whether or not to retweet the Cardi B video.”
Minutes later, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, 45, or Connecticut chimed in, “Omg, I had the same argument with myself 30 minutes ago!”
But when Schats told Murphy to go ahead and tweet out the Cardi B video, including warnings about the rapper’s profanity, Murphy tweeted back, “DHYB.” (That’s internet argot for “don’t hold your breath.”)
But the exchange wasn’t quite over. Minutes later, the Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, 68, of New York, took to his own Twitter account to inquire, “Guys, I’m still holding my breath. Are you gonna RT Cardi B or not?”
Ultimately, Cardi B did not earn a senatorial retweet. But on Instagram alone, her anti-Trump shutdown rant gained nearly 11 million views in the first 23 hours after she posted the video.
Photo By Cardi B Instagram
