Nicki Minaj spoke in detail about her support for Donald Trump for the first time in a 90-minute interview with Time magazine. The rapper describes herself as Trump’s “number one fan” and claims that many celebrities share her political stance but remain silent for fear of consequences: “Sometimes you just need one brave person to absorb the majority of the impact. I think I’m the catalyst for that change.” She doesn’t name any names.
Swatting incident as a turning point
Minaj describes the decisive impetus for her public confession as a personal experience: After repeated swatting incidents at her home in California, Governor Gavin Newsom did not react. Republican MP Anna Paulina Luna helped her establish contact with authorities and a private security service in April 2025. “I was shocked. I had never seen anyone in politics treat me like that,” Minaj told the magazine.
Obama and Jay-Z as an explanation
Minaj blames Barack Obama and Jay-Z for her departure from the Democratic Party. “I think Jay-Z cost Obama a lot in the end, whether he knows it or not,” she said. “A lot of rappers don’t like Jay-Z and were afraid to say it.” Her reasoning boils down to a circular argument: Because the Democratic president liked the rapper who blocked her career, the Republican president is now her choice.
In the interview, Minaj also defends her controversial tweets from 2021 in which she claimed the COVID vaccine caused swollen testicles in Trinidad. She delivers the most problematic moment of the conversation during the 2020 US election: when asked about Trump’s unproven claims about election fraud, she replies: “Obviously I don’t know, but when he says it, I know he’s done his homework.” Without any evidence, she also explains: “People are voting who shouldn’t be voting.” Law enforcement authorities have so far found nothing of such widespread election fraud. Minaj is also actively calling on her fans to get their representatives to support the SAVE Act – a bill that critics fear will increase voting barriers for women and people of color.
The price of Minaj’s political shift is measurable. Her LGBTQ+ fan base, one of her most loyal for years, reacted with an open break – triggered above all by her statement in Phoenix: “If you are born a boy, be a boy.”
Rappers as political experts
What the Minaj case reveals is a broader phenomenon: in a public in which political debates increasingly rely on identification rather than argumentation, celebrities become representatives of attitudes that require justification. Trust replaces facts, feeling replaces analysis. In the interview, Minaj himself compares the president not to political predecessors, but to a pop icon: “Just like Marilyn Monroe represents a vibe – Donald Trump is his own vibe.” She has already announced that she will support Trump in the midterm elections: “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
