Back in 2020, Nicki Minaj said she was \u201cnot gonna jump on the Trump bandwagon\u201d after years calling out his anti-immigration politics. Five years later, she\u2019s singing the president\u2019s praises as a full-throated MAGA supporter. What gives?<\/p>\n
The rapper was effusive in her praise for Trump during an interview this weekend by Erika Kirk, the widow of slain conservative figure Charlie Kirk, at Turning Point USA\u2019s AmericaFest convention held in Phoenix, Arizona. She called him \u201chandsome\u201d and \u201cdashing\u201d and also shared her admiration for Vice President JD Vance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love both of them,\u201d Minaj said. \u201cBoth of them have a very uncanny ability to be someone that you relate to.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was rewarded by praise from Vance, who said on X that Minaj \u201csaid something at Amfest that was really profound.\u201d She has been revelling in the attention, reposting a claim that she has gained more than 100,000 followers amid her newfound MAGA support.<\/p>\n
The world looked very different 15 years ago, when Minaj used Trump, then a private citizen and reality TV star, as an example of misogyny against women in the entertainment industry.<\/p>\n
During a scene for the MTV documentary \u201cMy Time Now,\u201d which traced Minaj\u2019s roots from her native Trinidad and Tobago to superstar rapper, she offered up her thoughts on how assertive women are viewed as \u201cb**ches\u201d as opposed to men who are thought of as powerful for the same behaviour.<\/p>\n
\u201cDonald Trump can say \u2018You\u2019re fired.\u2019 Let Martha Stewart run her company the same way and be the same way!\u2019\u201d she said, invoking Trump\u2019s catch phrase from the hit NBC reality show \u201cThe Apprentice.\u201d \u201cBut Donald Trump, he gets to hang out with young [expletive] and have 50 different wives and just be cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
Minaj had mixed feelings when Billboard asked her in 2015 how she felt about Trump\u2019s surging presidential campaign.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are points he has made that may not have been so horrible if his approach wasn\u2019t so childish,\u201d she said at the time. \u201cBut in terms of entertainment \u2014 I think he\u2019s hilarious. I wish they could just film him running for president. That\u2019s the ultimate reality show.\u201d<\/p>\n
She took a decidedly more critical view the following year, in a freestyle remix released in November 2016, the same month Trump was elected to his first term as president.<\/p>\n
\u201cIsland girl, Donald Trump want me go home,\u201d she rapped on \u201cBlack Barbies,\u201d a freestyle remix of Rae Sremmurd\u2019s \u201cBlack Beatles.\u201d<\/p>\n
Minaj, who was born Onika Tanya Maraj in Trinidad and Tobago in December 1982, has been open about coming to the United States as an undocumented child. In an emotional social media post in 2018, she called out the separation of families at the border during Trump\u2019s first administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came to this country as an illegal immigrant. I can\u2019t imagine the horror of being in a strange place & having my parents stripped away from me at the age of 5,\u201d she reportedly wrote in the caption of a photo showing young children separated from their parents at the border being detained. (Minaj deactivated her main Instagram account in October 2025.)<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is so scary to me. Please stop this,\u201d she wrote. \u201cCan you try to imagine the terror & panic these kids feel right now? Not knowing if their parents are dead or alive, if they\u2019ll ever see them again.\u201d<\/p>\n
She echoed those feelings at the Pollstar Live 2020 Conference, where she declared that she was \u201cnot gonna jump on the Trump bandwagon.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI get that a lot of people don\u2019t like him for obvious reasons. But what stuck with me was the children being taken away from their parents when they came into this country,\u201d Minaj said. \u201cThat really bothered me because I was one of those immigrant children coming to America to flee poverty. And I couldn\u2019t imagine a little child going through all of that, trying to get to another country because they didn\u2019t have money in their country, or whether you\u2019re fleeing from war.\u201d<\/p>\n
Things seemed to shift for Minaj during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anti-vaxxers flocked to her social media when, in September 2021 she posted a story claiming that an unnamed friend of her cousin had suffered \u201cswollen\u201d testicles and \u201cbecame impotent\u201d after getting a COVID-19 shot, which experts attempted to refute.<\/p>\n
By this year, she was reposting videos from the White House on TikTok, including one that used her \u201cVa Va Voom\u201d song as a soundtrack and touted Trump\u2019s anti-trans and anti-immigration policies. Then, after praising a Truth Social post by Trump about Nigeria, she was invited by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, to speak on the alleged plight of Christians there.<\/p>\n
Minaj said she was inspired to get involved given that Nigeria is home to some of her Barbz, as her fans are known.<\/p>\n
Now, some fans have been turning away from Minaj amid her MAGA turn, breaking up with her on TikTok and other social media.<\/p>\n
A video of Charlie Kirk saying he believed Minaj was not a good role model for young black women, spliced with a video of Minaj taking to the stage with his widow, was also widely shared over the weekend.<\/p>\n
Minaj joins a line of rappers supporting Trump.<\/p>\n
From Kodak Black to Minaj\u2019s former label mate and mentor Lil Wayne \u2014 who received a sentence commutation and pardon respectively from Trump during his first term \u2014 some hip hop artists have braved the wrath of their fan base, who have been less than thrilled by their connection to the divisive politician.<\/p>\n
While music gave her the platform to be able to speak so loudly in support of Trump and his administration, she\u2019s not as involved in the industry as she has been in the past.<\/p>\n
Minaj recently announced via her X account that she would no longer be releasing a new album scheduled for March 27, 2026.<\/p>\n
That post has since been deleted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2020, Nicki Minaj said she was \u201cnot gonna jump on the Trump bandwagon\u201d after years calling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-226702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}