Back in 2020, Nicki Minaj stated she was “not gonna jump on the Trump bandwagon” after years calling out his anti-immigration politics. Five years later, she’s singing the president’s praises as a full-throated MAGA supporter. What offers?
The rapper was effusive in her reward for Trump throughout an interview this weekend by Erika Kirk, the widow of slain conservative determine Charlie Kirk, at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference held in Phoenix, Arizona. She referred to as him “handsome” and “dashing” and likewise shared her admiration for Vice President JD Vance.
“I love both of them,” Minaj stated. “Both of them have a very uncanny ability to be someone that you relate to.”
She was rewarded by reward from Vance, who said on X that Minaj “said something at Amfest that was really profound.” She has been reveling in the consideration, reposting a claim that she has gained greater than 100,000 followers amid her newfound MAGA assist.
The world appeared very completely different 15 years in the past, when Minaj used Trump, then a non-public citizen and actuality TV star, for instance of misogyny towards girls in the leisure business.
During a scene for the MTV documentary “My Time Now,” which traced Minaj’s roots from her native Trinidad and Tobago to celebrity rapper, she supplied up her ideas on how assertive girls are considered as “b**ches” as opposed to males who’re considered highly effective for the identical conduct.
“Donald Trump can say ‘You’re fired.’ Let Martha Stewart run her company the same way and be the same way!’” she said, invoking Trump’s catch phrase from the hit NBC actuality present “The Apprentice.” “But Donald Trump, he gets to hang out with young [expletive] and have 50 different wives and just be cool.”
Minaj had combined emotions when Billboard requested her in 2015 how she felt about Trump’s surging presidential marketing campaign.
“There are points he has made that may not have been so horrible if his approach wasn’t so childish,” she said at the time. “But in terms of entertainment — I think he’s hilarious. I wish they could just film him running for president. That’s the ultimate reality show.”
She took a decidedly extra crucial view the following 12 months, in a freestyle remix launched in November 2016, the identical month Trump was elected to his first time period as president.
“Island girl, Donald Trump want me go home,” she rapped on “Black Barbies,” a freestyle remix of Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles.”
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 youngster. In an emotional social media put up in 2018, she referred to as out the separation of households at the border throughout Trump’s first administration.
“I came to this country as an illegal immigrant. I can’t imagine the horror of being in a strange place & having my parents stripped away from me at the age of 5,” she reportedly wrote in the caption of a photograph exhibiting younger youngsters separated from their mother and father at the border being detained. (Minaj deactivated her main Instagram account in October 2025.)
“This is so scary to me. Please stop this,” she wrote. “Can you try to imagine the terror & panic these kids feel right now? Not knowing if their parents are dead or alive, if they’ll ever see them again.”
She echoed these emotions at the Pollstar Live 2020 Conference, where she declared that she was “not gonna jump on the Trump bandwagon.”
“I get that a lot of people don’t 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,” Minaj stated. “That really bothered me because I was one of those immigrant children coming to America to flee poverty. And I couldn’t imagine a little child going through all of that, trying to get to another country because they didn’t have money in their country, or whether you’re fleeing from war.”
Things appeared to shift for Minaj throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Anti-vaxxers flocked to her social media when in September 2021 she posted a narrative claiming that an unnamed good friend of her cousin had suffered “swollen” testicles and “became impotent” after getting a COVID-19 shot, which experts attempted to refute.
By this 12 months, she was reposting movies from the White House on TikTok, together with one which used her “Va Va Voom” track as a soundtrack and touted Trump’s anti-trans and anti-immigration insurance policies. Then, after praising a Truth Social put up by Trump about Nigeria, she was invited by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, to converse on the alleged plight of Christians there.
Minaj stated she was impressed to get entangled provided that Nigeria is residence to a few of her Barbz, as her followers are recognized.
Now, some followers have been turning away from Minaj amid her MAGA flip, breaking apart with her on TikTok and different social media.
A video of Charlie Kirk saying he believed Minaj was not a very good function mannequin for younger black girls, spliced with a video of Minaj taking to the stage with his widow, was additionally broadly shared over the weekend.
Minaj joins a line of rappers supporting Trump.
From Kodak Black to Minaj’s former label mate and mentor Lil Wayne — who acquired a sentence commutation and pardon respectively from Trump throughout his first time period — some hip hop artists have braved the wrath of their fan base, who’ve been lower than thrilled by their connection to the divisive politician.
While music gave her the platform to have the opportunity to converse so loudly in assist of Trump and his administration, she’s not as concerned in the business as she has been in the previous.
Minaj lately introduced through her X account that she would not be releasing a brand new album scheduled for March 27, 2026.
That put up has since been deleted.