How Nicki Minaj went from Trump critic to the U.S. president’s biggest fan

Rapper Nicki Minaj made a surprise appearance at a Turning Point USA conference in Arizona, and made a gaffe after calling JD Vance an ‘assassin.’

Back in 2020, Nicki Minaj said 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 gives?

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’s AmericaFest convention held in Phoenix, Ariz.

She called him “handsome” and “dashing” and also shared her admiration for U.S. Vice-President JD Vance.

“I love both of them,” Minaj said. “Both of them have a very uncanny ability to be someone that you relate to.”

She was rewarded by praise from Vance, who said on X that Minaj “said something at Amfest that was really profound.” She has been reveling in the attention, reposting a claim that she has gained more than 100,000 followers amid her newfound MAGA support.

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.

During a scene for the MTV documentary “My Time Now,” which traced Minaj’s roots from her native Trinidad and Tobago to superstar rapper, she offered up her thoughts on how assertive women are viewed as “b**ches” as opposed to men who are thought of as powerful for the same behavior.

“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 reality show “The Apprentice.” “But Donald Trump, he gets to hang out with young [expletive] and have 50 different wives and just be cool.”

Minaj had mixed feelings when Billboard asked her in 2015 how she felt about Trump’s surging presidential 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 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.

“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 child. In an emotional social media post in 2018, she called out the separation of families at the border during 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 photo showing young children separated from their parents at the border being detained.

“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 those feelings 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 said. “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 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 “swollen” testicles and “became impotent” after getting a COVID-19 shot, which experts attempted to refute.

By this year, she was reposting videos from the White House on TikTok, including one that used her “Va Va Voom” song as a soundtrack and touted Trump’s 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.

Minaj said she was inspired to get involved given that Nigeria is home to some of her Barbz, as her fans are known.

Now, some fans have been turning away from Minaj amid her MAGA turn, breaking up with her on TikTok and other social media.

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.

Minaj joins a line of rappers supporting Trump.

From Kodak Black to Minaj’s former label mate and mentor Lil Wayne — who received a sentence commutation and pardon respectively from Trump during his first term — 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.

While music gave her the platform to be able to speak so loudly in support of Trump and his administration, she’s not as involved in the industry as she has been in the past.

Minaj recently announced via her X account that she would no longer be releasing a new album scheduled for March 27, 2026.

That post has since been deleted.