Nicki Minaj has recently made a very public pivot in support of MAGA ideology and Donald Trump. This move felt abrupt to many, but to those more aware of Minaj’s downward spiral into paranoia and antagonism over the past few years, it feels like the conclusion of the long destruction of a once unmatched legacy.
In many ways, I didn’t want to write this article. With the knowledge of the attention that commentary about Nicki Minaj can invite, and her abysmal behaviour of late, it feels against my better interest. Despite this, we cannot ignore Nicki Minaj’s hard pivot to MAGA ideology. As one of the most prominent rap artists and women in popular culture, with a (largely depleted) revered position within the queer community, this transition from Nicki is both alarming and potentially harmful.
Entering the 2020s, Nicki enjoyed a legacy unmatched amongst figures in her genre. While others like Lauryn Hill or Missy Elliot hold acclaimed status, no female rapper had the mainstream success and longevity of Nicki. She was considered a pioneer, a critically acclaimed artist, and a cultural icon. At the start of the decade, she was also experiencing a landscape populated by several other female rappers achieving mainstream success. Cardi B was already a few years into her career at the time (more on her later). Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat dominated the pandemic, becoming some of the first artists to gain mainstream success via TikTok. It was something that ultimately appears to have triggered the start of a long path toward the far right. We know that women are consistently pitted against each other in the music industry. We also know that Minaj enjoyed a monopoly over the female rapper niche for the better part of 10 years. With both things in mind, it is fair to say that the crop of new talent made Minaj feel insecure, combative, and experience sharing the mainstream public’s attention for the first time in her career.
Nicki’s many, many conflicts
Nicki already had a reputation for conflict with other artists, having public feuds with Remy Ma, Cardi B, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, and Lil Kim. While many of these feuds ended up doing little to impact Nicki’s public standing, they certainly had an impact on her psyche. Most notorious is her ongoing conflict with Cardi B, which began in 2018 and initially centred on the Migos song Motorsport, on which both women feature. During the song’s promotion, Nicki expressed disappointment with Cardi. The two would go on to exchange jabs online and get into a physical altercation at a party hosted by Harper’s Bazaar for 2018 New York Fashion Week. While this created discourse about both artists, Nicki ultimately found herself on a downward trajectory in the aftermath of her conflict with Cardi. She began a pattern of initially embracing women in the industry before turning on them in highly public spats, often to the detriment of her own standing in the court of public opinion. A notable example is her beef with SZA last year that was generally viewed as unfounded and embarrassing on Minaj’s part.
Perhaps the most notable example of this, excluding the conflict with Cardi, came with the 2024 fallout with Megan Thee Stallion. Though the two rappers had previously collaborated, relations between them seemed to have soured following Megan’s appearance on Cardi’s 2020 hit, WAP. Things came to a head with the release of Megan’s song, HISS, which sees Megan airing her grievances with a number of figures in the rap world. One bar in the first verse appears to take a shot at Nicki, namely drawing attention to Nicki’s proximity to several sex offenders (more on this later). In response, Nicki took to social media, essentially spending four days ranting on Instagram Live, writing a slew of increasingly incoherent tweets, and garnering criticism from the general public. Amidst this episode, accusations of an enduring cocaine habit also surrounded Nicki and further amplified the image of a flailing industry legend struggling to process her position in the rap world when it is no longer hers to inhabit alone.
The fallout of HISS was Nicki’s disstrack, Bigfoot. The title refers to when Megan was shot in the foot by Tory Lanez in 2020. In the track, Nicki takes jabs at this, along with the death of Megan’s mother, and typical slut shaming lyrics that claim Megan’s success is predicated on sexual favours. The song ends in a deeply awkward acapella section that feels like a voice note from an unhinged relative who wants to bitch you out for your politics differing from theirs. In disstracks, pretty much anything is fair game, so long as it feels like an actual diss; Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 campaign against Drake proved that to be true. The issue with this song and the context around it is that Minaj looked bitter and unprepared to execute an effective reply. Combine this with her pattern of attacking other female rappers and the fact that Megan’s alleged diss against her was one line in a song with an unconfirmed target, and the response becomes a sad attempt at legacy preservation. Regardless of where you positioned yourself in relation to Nicki’s music beforehand, this song represented the rock bottom of Minaj’s catalogue. While the song enjoyed inflated sales on iTunes thanks to Nicki’s fan base, it has not endured as a piece of music. Bigfoot only stands as a stark symbol of Minaj’s mental and creative decline.
Nicki Minaj’s creative decline
Alongside her increased isolation from other figures in the music industry, Minaj’s music itself has been on a steady decline over the first half of the 2020s. While the decade saw Minaj get her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one song, a 2020 remix of Say So with Doja Cat, her music has taken a nosedive. Her highly anticipated album, Pink Friday 2, was met with mixed reviews. I personally felt the project was reductive and derivative of Pink Friday, the 2010 debut album that it was the spiritual successor of. Across her most recent releases, Minaj has relied more heavily on low-hanging fruit trends such as lazy sampling to build the foundation of songs, and her lyricism also feels underbaked in comparison to her discography from the 2010s.
The supporting tour for the album, The Pink Friday 2 World Tour, was largely praised by critics. This was not a sentiment shared by many fans, particularly those attending dates like the show in Dublin, which was so late that the concert began a scant 40 minutes before the venue curfew. Similar issues hit dates such as several in Canada, with one seeing Minaj over three hours late for the concert. The date in Amsterdam was fully cancelled following an incident with Dutch police. Minaj was detained in the Netherlands on drug possession charges before being released. Given the growing speculation that Nicki has a cocaine addiction, this only added fuel to the dumpster fire that was her already flagging reputation with the general public.
Let’s talk about Nicki Minaj and her inner circle of sex offenders
Ahead of the tour, a fabricated statement from Live Nation circulated online warning concertgoers of the presence of Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, at venues. While the statement was fake, the context is real. In 1995, Petty was found guilty of the attempted rape of a minor in New York serving four years in prison for the crime. He was later found guilty of manslaughter in 2006. In 2022, he was sentenced to a year of house arrest for failing to register as a sex offender in California upon moving there with Minaj. While Petty was 16 when the 1995 assault took place, many still consider Minaj’s choice to associate with him a major stain on her legacy and her public relations. This is compounded by Minaj’s continued proximity to her brother, Jelani.
Jelani Maraj, Nicki’s older brother, was sentenced to 25 years for child rape in 2020. The initial incident took place in 2017 and involved an 11-year-old girl. In 2015, Minaj paid for Jelani’s bail after a child rape charge in New York. Minaj has remained a vocal supporter of her brother and continued to reference him in her music for several years, despite the knowledge of his sexual crimes. While Nicki herself has not been directly involved in either her husband’s or her brother’s sex crimes, her continued support of convicted sexual predators is what I believe has likely pushed her the most closely toward the cult of MAGA, which famously embraces sex criminals (and even makes them president).
Minaj, misinformation, and social media
Increasingly, social media is the heart of the internet, and it is where many people receive or share information about world events. Nicki Minaj is no different. An avid user of Twitter, Nicki has utilised the platform to connect to her fanbase and share her thoughts on current events. The first notable example of this becoming a dangerous behaviour from Minaj was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nicki shared testimony from a relative in Trinidad who allegedly became infertile due to a COVID vaccine. She encouraged scepticism of medical research amongst her fanbase, feeding into dangerous anti-vaxx sentiments already rife at the time. While this misinformation was understood to be just that, misinformation, by many who saw Minaj’s tweets, several younger fans voiced public support for her message. Minaj later doubled down on her vaccine scepticism in a 2023 Vogue interview.
Fast forward to last year, and on the back of a very public tweet war with Cardi B that involved insulting children, Minaj would go on to spread more misinformation through her Twitter account. This time, it was regarding an alleged Christian genocide in Northern Nigeria. While Northern Nigeria has long been a region suffering from Islamist terrorism, no evidence of a genocide against Christians has been reported by reputable sources. Notably, the Trump administration is the leading voice insisting that Christians are, in fact, being targeted by Muslims in the region. This is a claim that several Nigerians have publicly denounced as false. Violence is a lived reality for many in Nigeria, but it impacts all communities in the North regardless of faith background. While there are a myriad of reasons why this misinformation has been spread, it came to a head when Minaj spoke at the United Nations in New York last November.
During this time, Nicki also started publicly praising Trump and JD Vance for their achievements, including legal suppressions of transgender individuals. JD Vance threw public support behind Minaj, engaging in her feud with Cardi B by claiming Minaj was the superior artist. She would go on to fire jabs at California Governor Gavin Newsom over his support of transgender kids struggling in America, amidst the current political climate. Former collaborators of Minaj’s, such as Kim Petras, spoke out against her transphobic views.
Nicki Minaj and the full MAGA shift
Minaj’s metamorphosis into a bona fide MAGA supporter came with her public appearance with Erika Kirk at a Turning Point USA event in December last year. During the event, a Q&A panel between both women, Minaj voiced further praise for Trump and Vance, as well as further dismissing trans identities. In the panel, she expressed the feeling of having been pushed around and a need to show public support to the far right to ‘free’ herself of the political and social leanings of many in the entertainment world and her fans. At this point in the timeline, many fans had already begun disengaging from Minaj as an artist and a public figure, with her close association to people like Trump and Kirk putting a sharp halt to the already paper-thin patience people had for her.
Her appearance with Erika Kirk symbolised to many the final nail in the coffin that was Nicki Minaj’s professional legacy. While she has made her support of the Trump regime clear, it was possibly this physical proximity to one of the most public faces of the far right that solidified that this is a point of no return for Minaj. Kirk, since the death of her husband last September, has been a vocal and public mouthpiece for the cult of MAGA. Her ‘grief tour’ around the US has seen her continue her husband’s legacy as a hate monger and as someone comfortable dismissing the humanity of others. These sentiments were shared by Minaj, who, during the appearance, praised Kirk and mirrored her sentiments. Nicki had previously stated under the first Trump presidency that she would not succumb to his rhetoric, yet here we are.
The MAGA circus continues as Minaj is set to appear alongside Trump at an event for the U.S. Treasury later this week. The event, in support of a new ‘Trump retirement plan’, will mark the third time Minaj will have made public appearances on behalf of Trump or in support of his ideologies in the span of under three months.
The death of an icon
We cannot understate just how beloved Nicki Minaj was for over a decade. Her hegemonic presence in music and pop culture cemented her as one of the defining Black and Gay icons of the 21st century. Her professional legacy was unmatched amongst women in rap, largely being credited for making a niche in mainstream pop music for female rappers and proving that they could be lucrative A-list artists. This was a legacy backed not only by ubiquity but by critical acclaim and commercial success. You can clearly hear her sonic influence over several younger artists who have cited her as inspiration; this includes artists she has since publicly beefed with, including Megan and Cardi, her most notorious feuds.
It is with this in mind that this transition to MAGA feels all the more like an insult. The legacy Nicki built was on the back of the queer community, who upheld her career from her debut. Her fan community, the Barbz, are notorious for their fanaticism of Minaj and their zeal to go to extreme lengths to defend her. This community is primarily made up of queer people, women, and people of colour – all groups directly harmed by the violence wielded by the Trump administration. Her willingness to position herself in opposition to the very communities that made her a success feels like a brazen slap in the face. It is a clear indication of her diminishing public goodwill and the already heavy damage her legacy sustained earlier this decade that she would make such a radical pivot.
Nicki isn’t the only public figure to hard launch fascist leanings. Famously, the once celebrated children’s author turned TERF keyboard warlord J.K. Rowling squandered a beloved position in many queer people’s coming of age to align herself with transphobic and more widely anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments. Several other figures have also jumped ship to align with the Trump administration, Carrie Underwood being a key example. These moves demonstrate that fame and wealth cushion many celebrities from the constant moral outrage felt by everyday people who witness the injustices taking place in the US and around the world. Particularly in Minaj’s case, it also demonstrates a recognition that the moral accountability of left-wing or even centrist politics does not exist in MAGA. Nicki has been deflecting criticism over her proximity to sex offenders for the better part of 10 years. By aligning with a political ideology that is comfortable diminishing the severity of sex crimes, she is absolving herself of that pressure.
Additional commentary online has pointed out Minaj’s personal history, having entered the US as an undocumented immigrant at the age of five. Minaj, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, spoke publicly against immigration policies of the Trump administration during his first term. Now, in his second term, she is overlooking the continued human rights abuses taking place in the name of immigration reform in America. While human beings are being abducted and murdered by ICE without scrutiny and minimal accountability, she is aligning herself with the force behind the blatant degradation of civil liberties in the US. Nicki does not have a responsibility to use her platform to speak out against ICE, but her position as a successful woman in America who came to the US as an undocumented immigrant has real potential to reform the narrative that undocumented people are dangerous or a drain on America’s resources.
Her background as a black woman, an immigrant, and a once celebrated public figure serves to add legitimacy to the fatally violent behaviour displayed by ICE. If she, a woman of colour and a once undocumented immigrant, can support the man who has wielded ICE as his personal Gestapo, then surely her fans can too. Despite the tatters her legacy is in, she is still influential, and she still has a much larger platform than nearly any other person of a similar background. This public support of Trump and the MAGA movement more widely has real potential to sow division in black communities and between those who follow her blindly and those who have rejected her new persona.
So, where do we go from here?
Personally, I had disengaged from Minaj, her music, and her social media well over a year ago in light of her increasingly unhinged behaviours at the time. Many took this final form, the transformation into MAGA Minaj, as the time to pull the cord and remove Nicki from their lives. Many of her most devoted fans have been struggling to reconcile the once beloved artist with the paranoid, misinformed, fascist-aligned person we see today. A lot of her once devoted fan base is in the process of mourning the person they felt they knew. Particularly as her sentiments continue to skew more and more anti-LGBTQ+, the queer community has to reckon with the fact that one of our most beloved icons of recent times is no longer our ally; she is our enemy.
As with Rowling and Underwood before her, the only way to truly proceed is total disengagement. We cannot separate the art from the artist, nor can we act like this is an innocent misstep from an industry elder. The proximity to sex offenders, allegations of growing personal isolation and addiction, her history of attacking younger artists, and her penchant for spreading misinformation were all warning signs that this was always going to happen. Her legacy destroyed and her following in free fall, Nicki Minaj is the prime example of how a series of bad-faith actions leads people of all backgrounds towards extremism. In the aftermath, I see her for who she is: a grifter who aligns with hatred and division. That is a stain on her reputation that can never be washed out.
