DaBaby opened up about his political leanings in a recent hour-long sit-down with the Full Send podcast, in which he revealed who his first pick was in the 2020 presidential election and who he’s backing now. “I think I’m voting… yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said when asked what he thought about the failed presidential bid by fellow MC Ye (formerly Kanye West) in which Yeezy spent an estimated $12 million of his own money and scored an anemic 60,000 total votes nationwide out of a total of more than 154 million ballots cast.
“I’m voting for sure, yeah, I f–k with Ye,” he added. “He’s a gangster.” Asked if he’s a Donald Trump supporter, DaBaby joined a small group of fellow hip-hop stars who have expressed their fealty to the twice-impeached former leader, a roster that includes Lil Pump, rapper-turned-country rocker Kid Rock and 50 Cent, who was for Trump before he was against him. Trump is currently under scrutiny in the ongoing January 6 hearings in which staffers have described a commander in chief who watched TV for nearly 3 hours as armed insurrectionist stormed the nation’s capitol in a violent attempt to subvert the certification of President Biden’s victory.
“Do I f–k with Trump? Now? Hell yeah,” DaBaby said. “Trump is a gangster. He let Kodak [Black] out.” The latter appeared to be in reference to Trumps decision to include Black (as well as Lil Wayne) in his last-minute pardon spree on Jan. 19 as one of his final acts before leaving office.
Wayne (real name Dwayne Michael Carter Jr.) pleaded guilty to illegally possessing a loaded weapon on a private jet while traveling to Miami in December 2020. He is a convicted felon, stemming from a gun charge in 2007, which meant he was looking at 10 years in prison at his Jan. 28 sentencing. Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Wayne endorsed Trump for president and co-signed his “Platinum Plan” for the Black community, which led skeptics to believe it was all a tactic to receive a pardon. Bradford Cohen, the lawyer who helped set up Trump’s meeting with Lil Wayne, denied the speculation in an interview with The New York Times.
Black (real name Bill Kahan Kapri), 25, was in federal prison after pleading guilty to a firearms possession charge after being detained at the Canadian-American border in March 2020. Like Wayne, he also took to Twitter at the time to thank Trump for commuting his 46-month sentence. Kapri’s legal issues have continued, including an arrest for a drug charge during a recent traffic stop in Florida. The rapper, who was shot earlier this year during a Super Bowl afterparty in Los Angeles, has also been previously charged at various times with robbery, sexual assault, false imprisonment, fleeing a law enforcement officer, probation violations and more.
In addition to sharing his thoughts on the former president, DaBaby revealed the hefty six-figure paychecks he pulls in for club appearances and admitted that he he was completely unfamiliar with Saturday Night Live until he performed on the legendary 47-year-old sketch comedy series in Dec. 2019. “No disrespect to Saturday Night Live, but I didn’t even what Saturday Night Live was until I went,” he told the show’s hosts.
He also talked about performing in South Korea and said at one point he had a deal with Burger King for the “Jonathan Kirk” meal — in honor of his birth name — for which he he shot a completed commercial, “right before everything popped off,” the latter a seeming reference to the swift and wide-ranging backlash to his homophobic rant at the Rolling Loud festival in July 2021.
And while DaBaby declined to get into the details of the fallout to his anti-gay comments, he noted that he had a full slate of headlining tour dates scheduled before the shows went away. Asked if seeing those dates dry up frightened him, the rapper said the fact that he wasn’t worried “was probably my problem,” suggesting that it may have made him come off as looking “hard-headed.”
Watch the interview below (Trump talk begins at 54:10).
