Cardi B is still reeling from her best week ever (in the public eye, at least). She released her highly anticipated debut album Invasion of Privacy into the world, she performed a medley of her hits on Saturday Night Live, and surprised everyone with the news that she’s pregnant with her first child. On the heels of all of this comes a GQ profile, written by Caity Weaver, that catches Cardi right at the cusp of global domination.
There are a bunch of gems here, from Cardi talking about her butt injections (“They don’t numb your ass with anything!”) to making fun of Trump’s stance on arming teachers (“Don’t you calculate?”) to sharing that her favorite books are To Kill a Mockingbird, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Coldest Winter Ever, by Sister Souljah (“It’s a hood book, but it’s really good,” she says of the latter. “The main character is like my alter ego. She is a bad girl. I like a bit of bad-girl shit.”) You can read the whole thing here, but we highlighted a few of the essential things we learned about our Bronx-born favorite below.
She probably knows more about American presidents than you.
The interview doesn’t start with a popular Cardi one-liner, but with the rapper describing her love of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She pronounces it They-LAH-no— like your tia would say it—and launches into a pretty intense description of his presidency.
“First of all,” she says, “he helped us get over the Depression, all while he was in a wheelchair. Like, this man was suffering from polio at the time of his presidency, and yet all he was worried about was trying to make America great—make America great again for real. He’s the real ‘Make America Great Again,’ because if it wasn’t for him, old people wouldn’t even get Social Security.”
She schools Weaver, who didn’t know that Roosevelt started Social Security, and hits us with trivia about the 15th president: “Buchanan is the only president that was a bachelor.” You can thank Cardi for your American history lesson later, guys.
Her relationship with Offset has had its rough patches, but they plan to marry in Atlanta.
Cardi says she and Offset initially had some hesitations about each other: “It was just too much playing games. He would look for me; sometimes he would take a jet to me. And it was just like, ‘Let’s stop playing. We really love each other. I’m scared to lose you, and you scared to lose me.’”
Despite rumors of cheating, they’re engaged, and Cardi tells GQ she anticipates a wedding in Atlanta (she shares that she doesn’t have a license, so Offset’s uncle drives her around when she visits), and that Offset wants to raise their kids there.
She also let readers into a bit of their dynamic: Throughout the interview, Cardi says she’s bad at making decisions and that Offset, apparently, tells her to trust her instincts: “He always tells me, ‘Stop being afraid. You always afraid of something. Why you always afraid?’” And, perhaps the most important revelation of all, he sometimes calls her by her real name Belcalis, and she calls him Set, except “when I’m pissed off, I call him Kiari.”
She’s honest about her Bloods affiliation.
References to “bloody shoes” in “Bodak Yellow” and the color red fueled speculation that Cardi had ties with the Bloods (she actually confirmed her affiliation with the gang on Twitter last May, writing, “Bitch I been a big time Blood since I was 16 sooo fuck is you talking bout ..ya just never peep it.”) But she gave Weaver a few more words about her involvement, saying, “When I was 16 years old, I used to hang out with a lot of [pause] Bloods. I used to pop off with my homies. And they’d say, ‘Yo, you really get it poppin’. You should come home. You should turn Blood.’ And I did. Yes, I did.”
She went on to say she doesn’t talk about that part of her life because “I wouldn’t want a young person, a young girl, to think it’s okay to join it. You could talk to somebody that is considered Big Homie and they will tell you: ‘Don’t join a gang.’ The person that I’m under, she would tell you, ‘Don’t join a gang.’ It’s not about violence. It’s just like—it doesn’t make your money. It doesn’t make your money. I rep it, because I been repping it for such a long time.”
She may not be able tell Karlie Kloss and Taylor Swift apart.
During the interview, Cardi gets flustered when she sees someone who resembles Taylor Swift sitting near her at a restaurant. GQ reminds us that “Bodak Yellow” actually demoted Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” from the Billboard charts, eventually leading to Cardi’s ascent and making Cardi the first female rapper in the no. 1 spot since Lauryn Hill. Swift, the profile shares, had mailed Cardi “an opulent congratulatory bouquet.”
Cardi sends her publicist, Patience, on a reconnaissance mission to scope out if the women at the table is actually Swift. Weaver later explains, “I realize Cardi may have been looking at Karlie Kloss.” Cardi might not be able to tell Swift and Kloss apart, but let’s be real, who can?
She reacted to meeting Beyonce the way we probably would have.
Decisions are tough for Cardi, but so are compliments. She shares that she gets nervous about what people think and often has trouble reacting when people give her a compliment. It’s not to be rude, Weaver writes, but Cardi gets “overwhelmed by the possibility of having to meet an unending stream of fawning strangers, A-listers, and people who aren’t her cousins.”
Even when she met Beyoncé, Cardi says she had a slight freakout: “I’m too nervous. I’m too shy. When I met Beyoncé, people be like, ‘How that felt? I bet you was mad happy….It’s like, ‘Actually, I wanted to shit on myself.’ It was a very scary thing. All she was doing was like, ‘Hi. I love your music.’ And I was like, UHHHN.”