In 2018, Nicki Minaj wrote on Facebook that she “came to this country as an illegal immigrant @ 5 years old” while condemning Trump’s family separation policy at the southern border. On Oct. 25, she stood on a stage in Port Huron, Michigan, at a Trump campaign rally and told him: “If you run again, I will support you again.”
The distance between those two moments is why many Black fans are asking what she is backing. Minaj, born in Trinidad and raised in Queens, is one of the most visible Black women in American music. Her endorsement comes in the final week of a midterm campaign, and the president she is praising is the one whose immigration policy she once condemned.
What she says changed
Minaj has said little about the policies themselves. In an interview with Time published in May, she said she had felt that way about Trump already, “just that I didn’t dare act like that publicly,” out of fear of alienating fans. She called the music industry a “Democratic family.” She said California Gov. Gavin Newsom ignored her during “swatting” attacks on her family, including one in April 2025, and that this made her say: “I don’t care to keep this a secret anymore.” Those are her accounts of her own turn.
The public part came fast. She appeared at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December 2025, saying “it’s OK to change your mind.” She deactivated her Instagram account that month after a sit-down with Erika Kirk, reportedly losing close to 10 million followers. On Jan. 28 she told the Treasury Department’s Trump Accounts Summit: “I will say that I am probably the president’s number one fan, and that’s not going to change.” Asked about the backlash, she said: “It actually motivates me to support him more.”
She has also shown off a Trump Gold Card, the residency program the White House launched in December for wealthy foreign nationals. She says she received it free. The program arrived while the administration was clamping down on immigrants without status, the position she described herself in at age 5.
What she is backing now
The Port Huron rally supported Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who faces Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. Minaj flew there on Air Force One. She led a “We love Trump!” chant and called the event “a major turning point for our country.”
Trump stopped his speech to point her out. “By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj,” he said, then: “Stand up, Nicki. That’s hard to miss.” The crowd cheered. Later he added: “I hope Nicki wasn’t insulted, but we love Nicki.”
Why the Baartman comparison keeps coming up
Black writers have reached for the history of Sarah Baartman. A Khoikhoi woman from what is now South Africa, born around 1789, she was taken to London in 1810 and exhibited to paying European crowds as the “Hottentot Venus.” She died in 1815. Her body was dissected, and her remains were displayed at a Paris museum until 1976. Nelson Mandela asked France for them in 1994. France passed a law in March 2002 ordering their return, and she was buried in Hankey, Eastern Cape, on Aug. 9, 2002, South Africa’s National Women’s Day.
Her story is about ownership: other people profited from her body, put it on display, then studied and kept it after her death. Writing about the January summit, NewsOne argued that a Black woman with a “hyper-visible body” entering white political power “has never been a neutral act in Western history.” After the rally, NewsOne published Dr. Stacey Patton, who argued that Minaj is not a victim but made her own choice, inside what she called a “long history of racialized sexual display of Black women’s bodies.”
That is the line critics draw. Baartman had no say in who held her. Minaj does, and the question they put to her is what her platform is buying, and for whom, when the man cheering her describes her body to a rally crowd while campaigning on policies that fall on immigrants.
Minaj has said the criticism “does not affect me at all.” Election Day is Nov. 3.
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