Nicki Minaj’s credibility is Trump’s latest victim

This was Donald Trump, at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, introducing the crowd to Nicki Minaj, the rapper whom readers of The New World will doubtless recognise from her greatest hit, Anaconda, an ode to the benefits of a big behind. The president of the United States had, for once, found a subject on which he could speak with expertise (he has recently seemed unable to stop talking about various men’s arses, too. Your guess is as good as mine).

White House communications director Steven Cheung subsequently floated the idea of Minaj as the next press secretary, posting a video of her praising the president aboard Air Force One. To be fair, she could hardly be less qualified than Katie Zacharia, the last White House press secretary, who lasted less than a week in the job.

Minaj certainly has a way with words. Who else could have written, “I let him hit it ’cause he slang cocaine / He toss my salad like his name Romaine”? Ah, Republican family values.

On the face of it, it looks like possibly the most bizarre crossover in political history. But if you look deeper, it also seems to make perfect sense. Perhaps I’ve gone mad after 10 years of Trump.

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Minaj was, for years, an icon of Black, queer and youthful pop culture. Her extravagant sexuality and camp theatricality made her a hero to people who have traditionally had little reason to feel welcome in the Republican Party. Now she finds herself enthusiastically endorsing a president with a long record of racist rhetoric, and a party that has spent years attacking LGBTQ+ rights under the banner of protecting children from sexualisation.

At the rally, Minaj dutifully joined in, warning that children were being “bombarded with sex changes”. So the last line of defence against sexual decadence now has one of pop’s most conspicuously sexual performers on its side. This is, after all, the woman whose songs helped convince a generation of schoolgirls that having the arse of a normal 13-year-old was a fate worse than death.

Minaj has previously criticised the Trump administration’s family-separation policy in 2018, drawing on her own experience of arriving in America from Trinidad as a child. More recently, however, she has called herself Trump’s number-one fan

Her convictions may have genuinely shifted. Or maybe she has watched her own spotlight dwindle over the last decade, as it shifted to rappers like Megan Thee Stallion, with whom she has an enormous personal beef. Megan, incidentally, performed at a Kamala Harris campaign rally in 2024. 

Add to that Minaj’s fall from grace in the mainstream following her husband’s 2022 conviction for attempted rape, and you can see why a political reinvention might appeal. She has done what plenty of cancelled or fading celebrities have done before her: cleave to the right in the hope of a second shot at fame.

And Minaj is not, in temperament, quite the stranger to Trumpism that ex-fans might wish to believe. She has made a career of provocation, of turning personal grievance into public spectacle. Like Trump, she also has a bizarrely loyal fanbase that she sometimes seems to despise.

There is also the question of Minaj’s new look. At the rally, she arrived with blonde extensions, heavy make-up and blue contact lenses, a look that prompted online comparisons to what has come to be known as Mar-a-Lago face; that grotesquely over-surgically-enhanced look that Trump’s female henchmen all seem to morph into. 

Once upon a time, Republicans were up in arms about an unmarried mother on Murphy Brown and probably thought fake nails were the work of the devil. Now they seem perfectly happy to embrace sexualised, heavily made-up women, provided they’re on the right side of the culture war. Just look at how they’ve adopted Sydney Sweeney, famous for getting her large breasts out at any given opportunity, as a poster girl for the right.

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Aesthetics aside, for Trump, the whole thing comes off as a bit desperate and insanely out of touch. The midterms are approaching, Americans are furious about a multitude of issues, and he’s bringing pop stars on stage whom much of his base probably can’t stand. 

Meanwhile, the Department of Education is making sly nods to erotic Aryan Harry Potter fan fiction online. (I won’t even try to explain that one here, but listen to this episode of Touching Grass for context.) 

Minaj is hardly the first woman to get swept up in Trump’s orbit, dolled up and trotted out as a grinning trophy while he spews his increasingly incomprehensible bile. But be warned, Nicki; Trump has a habit of discarding people, especially women, once they’ve served their purpose. 

Just ask his first wife, Ivana, or look at the revolving cast of women who’ve passed through his administration. Karoline Leavitt, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Kimberley Guilfoyle and now Zacharia.

For a woman who’s spent her career insisting on her own power, becoming a prop in the Trump show seems a particularly lousy deal.