Over the past two weeks, a whole lot of people have been working to interpret the results of the recent presidential election. Joe Biden won the election, but he won it more narrowly than many pollsters predicted. One wrinkle is that Donald Trump slightly increased his level of support among Black and Latinx voters. Trump still won a small share of those votes. (According to NBC News, for instance, Joe Biden won 80% of Black male voters — down just slightly from the 82% that Hillary Clinton won in 2016.) One of the people evidently trying to make sense of that shift is former president Barack Obama, who mentions it in a new interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

In that Atlantic interview, Obama muses a bit on the appeal of Trump’s version of populism, and he connects it to rap music:

It’s this indication of parts of popular culture that I’ve missed. It’s interesting — people are writing about the fact that Trump increased his support among Black men [in the 2020 presidential election], and the occasional rapper who supported Trump. I have to remind myself that if you listen to rap music, it’s all about the bling, the women, the money. A lot of rap videos are using the same measures of what it means to be successful as Donald Trump is. Everything is gold-plated. That insinuates itself and seeps into the culture.

This is a strange and outdated way of looking at rap music’s role in popular culture. If rap has shifted from 2016 to now, it’s been in internal ways, with lyrics and imagery moving toward depicting drug addiction and depression. Despite attention-desperate Trump-fan anomalies like Lil Pump, rappers overwhelmingly supported Biden and other Democrats in the recent election, and the public support of the Atlanta rap community may have helped drive the Democratic vote in Georgia, one of the key states in this election. So maybe Obama should relax. If centrist Democrats are having a harder time winning votes from marginalized communities, maybe that’s not rap music’s fault. You can read the full interview here.