[Source: 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.”

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.

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.”

“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.

“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 dead or alive, if they’ll ever see them again.”

Things seemed to shift for Minaj during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anti-vaxxers flocked to her social media when in September 2021 she posted a story claiming that an unnamed friend of her cousin had suffered “swollen” testicles and “became impotent” after getting a COVID-19 shot, which experts attempted to refute.

By this year, she was reposting videos from the White House on TikTok, including one that used her “Va Va Voom” song as a soundtrack and touted Trump’s anti-trans and anti-immigration policies.

Then, after praising a Truth Social post by Trump about Nigeria, she was invited by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, to speak on the alleged plight of Christians there.

Minaj said she was inspired to get involved given that Nigeria is home to some of her Barbz, as her fans are known.

Now, some fans have been turning away from Minaj amid her MAGA turn, breaking up with her on TikTok and other social media.

Minaj joins a line of rappers supporting Trump.

While music gave her the platform to be able to speak so loudly in support of Trump and his administration, she’s not as involved in the industry as she has been in the past.

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