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The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
It seems like a relic now. But Donald Trump’s presidency once saw some of the culture’s most high-profile rappers grab their mics to condemn the president’s authoritarian policies. There was Ice Cube, dropping songs like “Arrest the President,” Childish Gambino shaking the world with the provocative music video for “This is America.”
But for some of those very same artists, Trump’s return to the White House is suddenly sounding copacetic, even good. The worst offender? Nicki Minaj.
There she was last week, a surprise guest at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, where, sitting next to Erika Kirk, Minaj praised JD Vance as an “assassin” and called Trump “dashing” and “handsome.” That was roughly one after Minaj accepted the Trump administration’s invitation to speak at the United Nations, only to parrot Trump’s false claims that the Nigerian government is purposefully ignoring the persecution of Christians by Islamic extremists in the country.
“Churches have been burned,” Minaj said sorrowfully. “Families have been torn apart…simply because of how they pray.” After her speech, UN Ambassador Mike Waltz awarded Minaj a UN hoodie in her signature Barbie pink.
Indeed, Minaj’s recent appearances have been difficult to square with her former self. Take Minaj’s 2016 song “Black Barbies,” a remix of Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles,” in which Minaj condemned Trump’s immigration policies.
“Island girl, Donald Trump want me go home,” she rapped, mentioning the president’s 2016 immigration crackdown. “Still pull up with my wrist like a snowcone.” In another lyric: “Half a milli on the Maybach Pullman, boardedNow I’m prayin’ all my foreigns don’t get deported.”
In 2018, she shared her own story about immigrating to the US from Trinidad as a child on Instagram. “I came to this country as an illegal immigrant at 5 years old,” Minaj wrote in a now-deleted 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 5.”
She then pleaded with Trump to halt the deportations, writing, “Please stop this. 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.”
When it comes to immigration, the situation today is markedly worse. As the Trump administration rolls out a brutal policy to deport the 11 million undocumented families living in the United States, has Minaj grown comfortable with family separations?
But it isn’t just a reversal on immigration. Minaj has spent 2025 gushing about Trump and his wife, Melania, reposting a now-deleted video of the couple dancing to a mashup of Minaj’s hit song and the 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” She regularly tweets in support of Trump and his cronies, even granting conservative television host Piers Morgan “clearance to fly through Barb Airspace”—whatever the hell that means.
The GOP has since embraced Minaj. “Nicki > Cardi,” Vice President JD Vance tweeted, while the Team Trump TikTok account posted the following video celebrating Minaj’s MAGA metamorphosis:
Minaj is also now beefing with Democrats and engaging in transphobia, with the rapper committing to a multiday Twitter battle with Gavin Newsom over the California governor’s comments about protecting trans kids’ rights to health care.
There’s simply no way the money is that good, especially when the rest of us see clearly why Trump entertains our support.
But Minaj isn’t the only rapper to make a right-wing rebrand this year.
Rick Ross, who in 2015 had his song “Free Enterprise” yanked from Walmart shelves over lyrics calling to “assassinate Trump like I’m Zimmerman,” not only performed at the president’s second inauguration, but he was also the headliner for this year’s Young Black Republicans Halloween Party. Even Snoop Dogg, whose 2017 music video for “Lavender” featured him aiming a gun at a clown dressed as Trump, showed he was willing to toss aside any existing animosity the second a fat paycheck came around. How else is there to interpret Snoop’s decision to reheat old hits for a room full of tech bros at the president’s Crypto Ball? There’s simply no way the money is that good, especially when the rest of us see clearly why Trump entertains our support: To secure the sweet votes of the Black community while actively dismantling the institutions designed to help us.
Look, I’m not expecting every rapper to be an activist. You don’t have to read James Baldwin to be a good musician. But to go from poignantly telling your own immigration story to full-throatedly supporting MAGA is something else entirely.
So I’ll end with a line from Dr. Karida Brown, author of The Battle for the Black Mind, about rappers claiming that Trump will make them rich, and why Black conservative leaders co-sign this. Here’s what she told me in March:
“In the case of conservative and billionaire boys club movements, they weaponize these tropes and tokenize people to parrot these tropes so that they can poison their own wells. And when they’re done with them, they discard them. What happens to tokens? They get spent.”
