In December of last year, things were looking grim for Nicki Minaj. The world’s best-selling female rapper had, this time, gone too far. Three months earlier, she had been embroiled in her nastiest online feud yet – with rival Cardi B. After Cardi B mocked Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, for being a registered sex offender, and her brother, Jelani, for being a convicted pedophile, Minaj snapped. She took to X, declaring Cardi B’s then–seven-year-old daughter, whom she called “Kulture Vulture,” ugly, threatening to “kick [her] gums back into formation,” and referring to her youngest daughter, Blossom, then one-year-old, as a “monkey and a roach”.
Minaj’s fans, the Barbs, had long tolerated her wild conspiracy theories – in 2021, Minaj claimed she refused the Covid vaccine because her cousin’s friend had been vaccinated and, according to her, his “testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding.” They had rallied even harder when she urged them to weaponise their fandom, mobilising (although unsuccessfully) against former collaborator-turned-rival Megan Thee Stallion to prevent her from claiming the No 1 spot on the Billboard charts. The Barbs didn’t merely endure Minaj’s madness; they devoured it, chasing her chaos like gospel. Yet, in the aftermath of her online tirade against a one-year-old, even they were left scrambling for anything remotely defensible.
And so Minaj abandoned her Grande Armée of left-leaning, multiracial, largely LGBT Barbs, leaving them in chaos as though Napoleon himself had vanished from the snowy fields of Moscow. She fled not to glory, but to the Maga kingdom, a halfway house for the decrepit and the evil, where every alliance smells faintly of rot. While feuding with fellow rappers is a routine – if not mandatory – ritual of maintaining status in one of America’s most competitive industries, sidling up to the Maga was once considered culturally verboten.
But Erika Kirk, its self-styled princess, welcomed her with open arms. At Turning Point USA’s annual gathering in the frosty final days of 2025, the world’s most famous female rapper proclaimed, “We’re the cool kids,” to a crowd of the least cool people in America. “The other people,” she added, “they’re the ones who are still just disgruntled, but really, they’re just disgruntled with themselves.” Kirk beamed back. No one was quite sure what to do.
One month later, it was time to return the favour. This week proved bruising for Donald Trump: he was compelled to murmur that it might finally be time to extract his commander-in-chief, Gregory Bovino, from the smouldering wreckage of Minneapolis. The invincible Trump who snatched Nicolás Maduro from his home at the beginning of the month seemed frailer, beleaguered, embarrassed. Into this chaos stepped Nicki Minaj, offering her own peculiar sanctuary. Finely manicured talons reached out, clasping his piebald hand in solidarity.
On 28 January, at the “Trump Accounts Summit” in Washington, DC, she took the stage to announce that she was “probably the president’s No 1 fan.” One attendee appeared to recognise her, releasing a solitary whoop from the back of the hall. Timothée Chalamet’s colleague Kevin O’Leary – formerly of Shark Tank fame – hovered and thumb-twiddled, awaiting his moment to kiss the ring. It was a scene that, just four years ago, would have seemed inconceivable: a theatrical pageant of loyalty, spectacle, and the slow, gleeful collapse of political and cultural gravity.
Nicki Minaj, in all her madness, may well signal the twilight of the liberal elite’s once fervent anti-Trump rebellion. In 2020, it was career-ending for a celebrity not to share a post in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Five years later, that cultural consensus has fractured – few major celebrities have acknowledged the widespread protests in Minnesota, even as political figures warn that the nation is straining toward something akin to civil rupture.
As his administration quipped to New York magazine this week, the “nobody loves Trump” phase has expired, replaced by the insidious normalisation of his policies – and a general indifference, if not outright tolerance, of right-wing autocracy by some of the US’s most influential celebrities. The spectacle of power has become entertainment; resistance has dissolved into partnership.
In 2019, Minaj rapped, “Island girl, Donald Trump want me go home”. One year later, she argued that “I get that a lot of people don’t like [Trump] for obvious reasons. But what stuck with me was the children being taken away from their parents when they came into this country… I couldn’t imagine a little child going through all of that.” In the same week that the Trump administration’s immigration force shot and killed the 37‑year‑old ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, she became a cultural handmaiden to the president.
Minaj is by no means the first celebrity to bow at the altar of Donald Trump. Maga America isn’t just a vanguard movement any longer; it has its hegemonic outriders, from plutocrats to popstars. She joins a grim parade of opportunists and outliers – Conor McGregor, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, Mike Tyson, Jake Paul, Caitlyn Jenner. What is surprising, however, is just how far she has travelled to arrive here. The last few years have traced a dizzying arc, taking her from torchbearer of America’s liberal elite to the court jester of the right. Perhaps she was only ever loyal to provocation itself, instinctively gravitating toward the most radioactive figure in the room. Or perhaps she understood, belatedly, that the scowling liberals would never absolve her for waging war on a child not yet able to walk. Either way, the era in which pop-cultural figures are expected to defend their fanbases – to maintain dignity in the face of flashing Turning Point dollar signs – is drawing to a close.
Meanwhile, the Barbs stand shivering in the snow, abandoned on a battlefield they no longer understand. The Berezina River awaits.
[Further reading: The chicks who dig Luigi Mangione]
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