By Lisa Respers France, CNN
(CNN) — 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, Arizona. She called him “handsome” and “dashing” and also shared her admiration for 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. (Minaj deactivated her main Instagram account in October 2025.)
“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 dea