The Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica, pop music critic for The New York Times. It covers the latest in pop music criticism, trends and news.

In 2015, after Aretha Franklin played an outstanding, fur-dropping rendition of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” onstage at the Kennedy Center Honors, Barack Obama reflected on the performance in an email to The New Yorker editor David Remnick. “Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock ’n’ roll — the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” he wrote. The commander in chief had become the music critic in chief.

There will be untold differences between the presidencies of Donald J. Trump, who was sworn into the office today, and Mr. Obama, who just completed his second term. But one of the vastest chasms might be cultural. No president has ever had the fluency with American cultural life that Mr. Obama has had, and no president has deployed its symbolism so effectively.