Nicki Minaj joining Erika Kirk on stage to praise President Donald Trump might not have been on your 2025 bingo card, but those who were watching saw clear signs of her unexpected journey.
The rapper has fully embraced the MAGA movement in recent months, but her descent into the depths of the right has been a long time coming.
In November, Minaj stood by the president’s remarks on the alleged slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, appearing at the United Nations soon after.
Nicki Minaj speaks during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2025 on Dec. 21 in Phoenix.
And seemingly in the blink of an eye, the artist went from being out of the political conversation to touting her admiration for Trump and JD Vance, even admiringly calling the vice president an “assassin” during an awkward interview with Kirk, whose husband Charlie was shot and killed in September during a college campus appearance.
“This administration is full of people with heart and soul, and they make me proud of them. Our vice president, he makes me … well, I love both of them,” Minaj said on Sunday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix.
“Both of them have a very uncanny ability to be someone that you relate to,” she added, calling Trump a “handsome” and “dashing” role model for young men.
Minaj sang a very different tune before Trump entered politics. She once criticized the fame-hunry businessman and chastised misogynistic culture by citing the former reality TV star’s lifestyle compared to entrepreneur Martha Stewart.
“Donald Trump can say ‘You’re fired,’” she said in a 2010 clip. “Let Martha Stewart run her company the same way and be the same way! ‘Oh evil bitch!’” she observed., “But Donald Trump, he gets to hang out with young [bleeped expletive] and have 50 different wives and just be cool.”
But the way Minaj fell fully into the MAGA movement might sound familiar if you look closely.
When Trump announced his first bid for the White House, Minaj implied that the two Queens locals had more than a childhood neighborhood in common.
“There are points he has made that may not have been so horrible if his approach wasn’t so childish,” Minaj told Billboard in 2015.
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Like many other people who ultimately came to support Trump, she openly disagreed with certain policies he ran on. However, her distrust in the government surfaced and eventually boiled over during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The artist attached herself to anti-vaccine rhetoric, even tweeting in 2021 that the jab made her cousin’s friend “impotent.” A mistrust in medicine paired with prominent figures on the right embracing “big pharma” skepticism created a health-focused pipeline for untold thousands of people across the country to fall into supporting Trump.
Despite denouncing tactics like immigrant family separation and his mass deportation agenda, more focused topics that seemed to impact Minaj allowed her to ignore what she didn’t like about Trump and voice support for some of his policies.
Minaj might be just the latest celebrity who stepped onto a political soapbox, but her choice to fixate on “relatable” causes while ignoring the many heinous aspects of Trump’s agenda is a song we’ve heard before.