Nicki Minaj declared herself Trump’s ‘No. 1 fan.’ Why is that controversial?

Rapper Nicki Minaj on Wednesday declared herself U.S. President Donald Trump’s “No. 1 fan,” before showing off a gold card visa.

The Super Bass singer made the comment on stage with Trump at a Treasury Department summit, where the U.S. president was promoting his new “Trump accounts.” After introducing her as “the greatest and most successful female rapper in history,” Trump said Minaj would be donating “hundreds of thousands of dollars” of her own money to those accounts.  

It all came after a sustained campaign of support for Trump from the musician.

“I am probably the president’s No. 1 fan. And that’s not going to change. And the hate or what people have to say — it does not affect me at all,” Minaj said Wednesday. “It actually motivates me to support him more.”

Minaj followed those comments with a post on X, in which she showed off a Trump gold card visa. Introduced late last year, the program is designed to give a path to permanent residency and citizenship to highly skilled foreign workers able to pay a $1-million US fee. 

Minaj, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago but said she arrived in the United States at five years old as an undocumented immigrant, posted on X that she is “finalizing that citizenship paperwork as we speak as per my wonderful, gracious, charming president.” She further said that she received the card “free of charge.”

The congratulatory words crown something of a political shift for Minaj. When Trump first ran for U.S. president, Minaj told Billboard, “There are points [Trump] has made that may not have been so horrible if his approach wasn’t so childish,” while also expressing limited support of Democrat Hillary Clinton. 

According to People, she criticized Trump’s family-separation policy in 2018, writing in a since-deleted Instagram post: “I can’t imagine the horror of being in a strange place and having my parents stripped away from me at the age of five. This is so scary to me. Please stop this.” Then she said at the Pollstar Live 2020 Conference that she was “not going to jump on the Trump bandwagon.”

“What stuck with me was the children being taken away from their parents when they came into this country,” she said at the time. “I was one of those immigrant children coming to America to flee poverty.”

But later, Minaj’s opinion around Trump changed. Around the time the U.S. president sowed doubt about the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, Minaj opted not to attend the 2021 Met Gala due to its vaccination requirements; she said she had not received a COVID vaccine and would not get one. She then claimed on X that a cousin’s friend in Trinidad suffered from “swollen” testicles, causing impotence, due to a COVID vaccination. 

Both Trinidad and Tobago’s health minister and then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci rejected the veracity of that story.

Beginning in 2025, her alignment with Trump became more explicit. She shared and reposted pro-Trump content on social media, championing his campaign against trans athletes in women’s sports and his crackdown on immigration. And later, she spoke at a United Nations event, organized by the Trump administration, on “the deadly threat” faced by Christians in Nigeria. 

Her appearance came after she replied positively to a Truth Social post by Trump about Nigeria. The African Union has refuted Trump’s claim that there are mass killings specifically targeting Christians in the country. 

Then in December 2025, Minaj appeared alongside Erika Kirk, widow to conservative pundit Charlie Kirk, at a Turning Point USA event. There, she called Trump a “handsome, dashing president” and read from her past tweet criticizing California Governor Gavin Newsom’s support of trans children. 

Each generated their own cycle of media attention, think pieces and — as Minaj said Wednesday — hate and backlash. But one particular element of Minaj’s alignment with Trump has been a particular large reason why she has come under fire.

From early on in her career, social editor at Exclaim! magazine Sydney Brasil said, the musician courted a queer fanbase. At one point Minaj described herself as bisexual, while at another she directly pleaded with gay fans not to commit suicide and in 2019 pulled out of a performance in Saudi Arabia due to human rights complaints against women and LGBTQ+ people.

“She spent so much time, so much of her career, catering to the fact that much of her audience is LGBTQ,” said Brasil. “Obviously, they’re going to feel like they’re betrayed in some way, because she’s sort of been idolized in this way that she’s now sweeping under the rug.”

But she is far from the only public figure to support the U.S. president, El Jones, an assistant professor at Halifax’s Mount Saint Vincent University, pointed out. In the world of hip hop, artists Sexyy Red, Lil Wayne, Ye and Snoop Dogg have supported Trump at various periods in their careers.

Outside of musicians, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado recently presented her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, shortly after he directed an operation to seize her country’s president. 

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mark Carney was elected in April 2025 largely on an anti-Trump campaign message. Some have since criticized him, accusing him to capitulating to Trump without securing benefits for Canada in return.

Given those and similar big names outside of the world of entertainment expressing vacillating statements of support, Jones said, it’s important to view Minaj’s own shift in perspective.

“Absolutely, we can talk about entertainers, but I would caution us to not just stop at entertainers,” Jones said. “Obviously, while she has cultural power, the real power lies with the billionaires, the corporate leaders, the politicians that are doing the same thing, often flying under the radar.”

But given what Minaj’s fans thought of her prior to this shift, Jones said, it makes sense that some are particularly upset. 

“The same power of a fanbase to support you — and she’s had a very supportive fanbase that’s held her up — that fanbase can’t be expected to continue to show up for her when she’s, to many of them basically, said she’s against them.”