If she had jumped on the bandwagon a little earlier, she’d be set. Instead, she’s now screwed.
that beloved nutcase and world-renowned rapper Nicki Minaj was in the midst of a deeply undignified MAGA pivot, and it brings me no satisfaction to note that this humiliation has continued unabated. Minaj hasn’t given up the gimmick one bit—in fact, she has emerged as a reliable partisan for right-wing causes of all stripes, staying on message with Karoline Leavitt–hewn discipline.
Scroll through her X account, and you’ll find Minaj camping hard for the SAVE Act, an ill-conceived voter-suppression measure that would disenfranchise countless Republicans and Democrats alike. It’s the exact sort of Capitol Hill legalese that Minaj previously expressed no interest in whatsoever—a topic discussed exclusively by terminal wonks like Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones. And yet, in her activist turn, Minaj has become one of the bill’s biggest boosters. “Do politicians realize it will be the beginning of the end for them if the #SaveAmericaAct doesn’t pass?” she posted earlier this week, as part of a larger rant. Attached was a garish A.I. image of Chucky fromIt goes on like this. Minaj is a dutiful soldier for all MAGA hyperfixations: She has adopted Donald Trump’s preferred nomenclature for the governor of California ; she has eagerly endorsed the conspiracy that millions of immigrants aredemonic presence inhabiting the souls of her political enemies . Plenty of observers have pointed out the hypocrisy of Minaj’s realignment—this is a woman who, in her artistic oeuvre, has probably come up with more metaphors for anilingus than anyone else alive. But, really, that’s only a small part of what makes this moment so embarrassing. Because, straight up, I believe that Minaj has executed the most poorly timed MAGA rebrand in history. In fact, nobody else really comes close.The timeline speaks for itself. Minaj’s MAGA apotheosis occurred in December, at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, when she sat down for a bizarre interview with Erika Kirk. The topics discussed included Trump’s aspirational masculinity, Minaj’s distaste for cancel culture, and some bog-standard anti-trans rhetoric. But the most telling exchange occurred partway through, when she referred to the legion of spray-tanned reactionaries in the audience as the “cool kids.” In other words, Minaj had detected that rancorous conservatism in the Trump mold represented the heat of the cultural current, in the way that millennial progressivism—the contingency that originally made her famous—did not. The thing is, Minajcorrect in that estimation, but for only about six months from November 2024 to the spring of 2025, when the Democratic coalition was in tatters and Trumpism was at the peak of its powers. But inevitably, as it tends to go with these things, the fundamental grotesquerie inherent to the Republican brand would ultimately overshadow its victory, thanks in no small part to the wildly unpopular policies forwarded by an ideological formation way too high on its own supply. A Reuters poll currently has Trump at asecond term. Even more painfully, the man is underwater on what were once some of his best issues. His approval on the economy has swooned below even. The Gen Zers who supposedly represented a new bastion of Republican influence are now nowhere to be found: As of February,, after being down just 7 points last March. All of this, of course, is happening at the precise moment Minaj went all in. Whoops!for long, especially in the sanctum of popular music, which—unfortunately for Minaj—also doubles as mass culture. The natural order has reasserted itself, and in this case the natural order is a huge majority of Americans watching and enjoying the Super Bowl halftime show while a handful of unsocialized malcontents throw a humongous, nonsensical hissy fit, tuning in to a podunk Kid Rock stream in protest—self-ghettoizing in the dumpster of the ideational sphere. Same as it ever was, I guess. If Minaj had decided to join up with MAGA in 2023, 2024, or even early 2025, she’d be in hog heaven. Hell, she’d probably have a Cabinet appointment. Instead, she tied herself to the movement at the very instant the worm began to turn, without even affording herself enough runway to perform a Marjorie Taylor Greene–style disillusionment routine. Already Minaj is feeling the heat. An online petition, created by her outraged fans, sardonically demands that she be deported back toAnd you know what? Despite everything she’s said, I still don’t read Minaj as an especially political person. Her tumble down the MAGA rabbit hole doesn’t read as a cut-and-dried radicalization case. Granted, I might be giving her too much credit: In the heat of the pandemic, she made an instant-classic tweet alleging that the COVID vaccine had left a family friend impotent due to testicular swelling—in retrospect, that was perhaps the first sign something had gone awry in her psychic makeup. But nevertheless, I have always understood Minaj to be one of the shrewdest, most mercenary pop stars alive. She was the Littlefinger of Billboard charts, perpetually nudging herself closer to the zeitgeist, even if it meant associating herself with unsavory characters. The best example might be from the summer of 2020, when she featured on a song with the sketchy rapper 6ix9ine, which was released while he was still locked up in prison for a RICO conviction. 6ix9ine was basically radioactive at that point in his career, and she still managed to take the song to the top of the Hot 100.Grocery Hackers Are Obsessed With This Secretive Element of Snack Production. But Can It Survive a Legal Crackdown? It was a classic Minaj story. The woman has made so many bets throughout her career, and nearly all of them have paid off. She hustled into the orbits of both Lil WayneKanye West at the peak of their powers. She innately understood the discourse-tilting weight of the internet, cultivating a monolithic stan army that terrorizes Twitter and Instagram to this day. She capitalized on the social justice wave of the 2010s, enshrining herself as a pop-feminist icon, even if that characterization never made a ton of ontological sense. But alas, Minaj has now bet on Trump, and her luck has finally run out. I hope there is still time for her to reconsider her erring ways and return to the good graces of liberal consensus. But that alone would make her an outlier. One of the enduring lessons of this sad era in American history is that once someone goes MAGA, their core instinct is to double, triple, or quadruple down, and in that sense, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if a futureincludes several songs about Iranian regime change, perhaps featuring guest verses from Reza Pahlavi. The MAGA movement has a way of transforming creative minds into bland vessels of grievance—stifling their ingenuities, hemming in the scope of their world until it is colored only by the most recent thing Trump has complained about. Minaj is the latest victim. For that reason, among many others, I’ll never forgive
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