Since November, Nicki Minaj’s support of President Donald Trump has gone from casual to full throated.
She’s called herself Trump’s No. 1 fan, appearing with him in the oval office, and regularly posting support for his policies on X. Over a decade into the Trump political project, we have become accustomed to these celebrity embraces of the MAGA movement. This extends to the rap industry, where everyone from Kanye West to New York drill rapper Sheff G has gotten behind the President.
But with Nicki, there was still a range of reactions—from mild disappointment to dark comedy to a resigned sense of inevitability: That these two grievance-fueled personalities from Queens with diehard followings were always going to find each other.
However, for many of Minaj’s 26 million followers on X —particularly the hyperaggressive wing of her fanbase known as Barbz—her support for Trump was significantly more impactful. Seemingly overnight, an online space typically dedicated to feuds with other rappers and pumping Nicki’s streaming numbers turned to debates over immigration policy, voter fraud, and women’s reproductive health.
In the past, Nicki has not been shy about wielding her influence amongst this base, weaponizing them against her enemies and galvanizing them to support her work. But now she is using them for something “more” than petty personal interest. She has made a potentially impactful political endorsement.
When Trump’s former head of communications Kate Miller had Nicki on her podcast and asked if she had any ambition to enter politics, the rapper responded, acutely, “I already have.” The alliance could signal a greater trend for political mobilization, and for the power of celebrity fanbase cultivation and control in the future. So we wanted to reach out to the Barbz nation in an attempt to conduct a representative survey of the current state of her fanbase—who they are and how they feel about Nicki’s rightward shift.
(Author’s Note: The following interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity)
Barb No. 1: Calz
Calz is a 27 year old white woman based in southern Virginia who works in real estate. She also runs a Barb Stan account on X, with over 58,000 followers, several thousand coming in the last few weeks. Her account has always reflected the passions and interests of Minaj, so in the past several weeks this has included sharing Trump videos and praising him for “putting God first” in America.”
“I actually didn't vote for Trump. I voted for Kamala [Harris]. I was a Democrat because I just believed what everybody was saying about Trump. That he was a horrible person and he was against the LGBTQ community and all of his people were racist and that I shouldn’t vote for him— the Democrats really fooled me with that one. But as we have come to find out, that is a lie. Because he's not racist and he's not against that community. When Nicki talked to him, he cleared that up for her personally. Now that I've actually looked more into it, I do think that he's doing good things for our country.
This is definitely new territory for us Barbz.
Before recently, I would say Nicki’s fans were mostly Democrats. Because when a group of Barbz tried to get me, they went to Nicki saying I am from a Trump supporting family, and all this stuff. They didn’t know Nicki supported Trump at that time. So I would say it was mostly Democrat. It is interesting to see the change because, for us, we were just talking about Nicki’s music all day long, and now the algorithm is getting more political about things that have to do with our country versus music.
I think we're making a great transition into that. We're all kind of growing up. It's a great time to get into politics, especially the way the world is now. So I think it's good for us. I think it's important that we are learning about things going on in our country that we should know. And I think it's good that Nicki is opening our eyes to things that we probably wouldn't have seen on our algorithm before.
Nicki has always been for the underdog. So if she sees a pile of people ganging up on someone, no matter what it is she'll speak up. And I think that if you look at how they treated Trump, it's very similar. We are used to defending ourselves because just like Nicki, people are always saying negative things about Donald Trump. It seems like a lot of people don't like him, especially a lot of younger people. So it's a big shift for the Barbz. This isn't just a tiny change. It's a big change, I would say.
And I think the Democrats and the other female rap fans, the way they treated her over the years has not been good. They’ve tried to discredit her. People are seeing the support that she's getting from Republicans. They're helping her with whatever she is trying to do. They're backing her 100%. She's gained followers on X. She's not losing anything. She's been moving forward.
Most of the big pages are sticking with her and we’re just putting our little political Barbie hats on and doing that. So I think a lot of people are seeing that this is actually good for her and the Republicans, because the swatting thing that happened, she did reach out to countless Democrats and to Gavin Newscum—or Newsome (Laughs). And he completely ignored her.
He's the governor of California. He's not even trying to help keep her safe in her own house.”
Barb No. 2: Nicole Harper
Nicole Harper identifies as a Black American trans woman from Mount Vernon, New York. She is in her “late 20s” and works as a hair and makeup artist. Nicole views the MAGA pivot more as a canny career choice than an ideological shift and supports it simply because she sees it as good for Nicki.
“I was taught to be a Democrat.
The first time that I was ever able to vote wasn't about voting Democrat or Republican. It was voting for Black. It wasn't a political thing, It was a skin color thing. I feel politics is just the game America plays.
I think the choice of the two is the illusion of control, to give us choices to make us feel like we have one. That’s why I subscribe as a Barb. I’ve never been into politics that much. I’m not just going to jump into it now and fake the funk because ‘Oh, I can't believe Nicki sided with Trump.’ Like, I can believe it. I'm not one of those people who will stop enjoying someone that I love because of their political beliefs, because I don't think that there's anything that Nicki can do to change what Trump was already going to do whether she sided with him or not. I think it’s the people with an actual para-social relationship with Nicki jumping ship.
We've seen a million celebrities stand behind Trump and I've never seen the entire Democratic party—like the Democratic party Twitter handle—coming for one person. When Nicki was being swatted she called out to the Democratic party for help and no one helped her. So now she could say when I was with this party, they paid me dust. But it's damned if you do, damned if you don’t anytime it’s Nicki Minaj. That’s how that party is. It’s ‘Protect Black Women’ anytime, unless it’s Nicki Minaj.
No shade but why are people interviewing Barbz about their stance on what Nicki believes in? It's one of those things where it's not supposed to be that serious. And I only think it's become this serious because Nicki’s power and her influence and her impact has always been underestimated, and now being next to the man in charge? Now it has become scary for some people because Trump is violent, we won’t say he's not, he has followers that will climb the walls of the White House for him, and they scare me too. So that's why I say this is not me aligning myself with her political beliefs. It's me aligning myself with her fight.
I was talking to somebody not too long ago and he said something like, ‘you know you guys look at her like she's y'all's moms’ or something like that, and I'm like, ‘well, it's so funny that you said that because a lot of people didn't even know who they were until they saw Nicki Minaj for the very first time.’
So you take one million people that saw a lady that looked like a Black Barbie on TV and said ‘I wanna be that, this is the most hyper-feminine thing I've seen ever in my life and I wanna be just like this.’ This is the story of millions of us. And then 17 years later we shouldn’t be fans anymore? That's not how it works.
I don't think Nicki was ever an LGBTQ advocate. Like we're not gonna make her that now because she's become a millionaire. She's never conformed to that. We asked Nicki, ‘Do you think we should have a gay rapper?’ she didn't say ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘I AM A GAY RAPPER. YOU HAVE ONE.’ You've never seen Nicki hold up a gay flag on stage. She's never held up a trans flag on stage. She's never performed at a Pride. It's always been pro-Barb, only.
[Editors note: Nicki Minaj performed at Pride Atlanta in 2010. In 2019, she pulled out of a performance in Saudi Arabia, citing "the rights of women" and "the LGBTQ community." ]
For me and for most Barbz, we'll probably all say the same thing, like this MAGA move is the kind of thing she does that EXPLAINS why I love her. ‘Yes diva! Go against the grain, F these people,’ and it's like even if that means them feeling like you’re going against us, we understand, and that's what is probably weird to people. They don't understand how we could understand this, but you're not a Barb so you're not supposed to understand it.”
Barb No. 3: SNS_Anon
And finally, the strangest interaction was with an X user who wishes to be identified by their handle, SNS (@SNS_Anon). SNS expressed interest in participating in an interview, but stipulated they would only participate via DM, not over the phone.
When pressed, their stated reason for not wanting to get on a call was “I don’t get into Twitter Spaces or phone calls or anything because I don’t want anyone to know my identity, even if they promise to keep it between us. I might be recognizable from the way I speak. I do work in public and media that’s not related to this account, that’s why lol.”
What resulted was the text of a civil discussion held over the course of two and a half hours. Versions of the same relatively standard questions about Nicki's MAGA endorsement and its effect on Barbz online discourse were posed. The bottom left corner of the text box would indicate "SNS is typing" for some time, then respond with several extremely clean, thoughtful, sterile paragraphs.
SNS opened with "I've been the biggest advocate on my older 23.5K followers page, which many people credit for Nicki Minaj going MAGA, though I wouldn't go that far." The majority of SNS's responses focused on Trump and MAGA rather than Nicki, which stood in stark contrast to conversations with Calz and Nicole.
SNS describes themselves as "in my 20s, female, white, straight, I'll skip the state"—they would later reveal they were located in the Pacific time zone.
"I wasn't a conservative in Trump's first year, I never voted, didn't even vote in the 2020 election. I was mostly liberal. I only became conservative around 2021-2022 when I started reading some Thomas Sowell books and listening to figures like Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Ben Shapiro.
Nicki didn't like how she was treated by Democrats when she spoke about the vaccine. Remember, she claimed she was locked out of her Twitter account just for questioning the vaccine, and the Twitter Files later revealed that the Biden administration directly pressured Twitter, along with Facebook (according to Zuckerberg), to aggressively suppress any negative speculation around the vaccine.
Nicki Minaj herself said it's perfectly fine to change your mind, which means she probably changed her mind on those previous statements regarding his immigration policy. We all inevitably fall victim to relentless propaganda at some point. You will consistently see countless people dramatically going from extreme left, radical Democrat to staunch conservative Republican, you won't see many Republicans become nose-piercing, purple-haired liberals. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
I think it doesn't matter as much to some, but there are some who are OK with this new transition because they believe it's not real and she's doing it for something personal. Again, I think after the Charlie Kirk assassination, a lot of pages woke up to just how much the Democrats don't want anyone to have a different view, so there's a huge chunk that believes you can have different views so it might not matter to them as much.”
At one point SNS was asked about the SAVE Act, which is a piece of "Voter Safety" legislation Minaj has become a spokesperson for. The account responded, "Yes! @ScottPresler has been great in helping us getting it passed."
Scott Presler is an activist for the Republican party and co-founder of an organization called Gays for Trump, who has worked for the anti-Muslim advocacy group ACT for America. He has come out in support of the second amendment because "armed gays don't get bashed," as well as Ron DeSantis' "Don't Say Gay Law" in his home state of Florida in 2022. He was briefly an operative working for the Republican Party in Virginia in 2016, but was fired after his involvement in a sex scandal that involved posting explicit photos of a sexual encounter in an RNC office on Craigslist. He currently has 2.4 million followers on X and has appeared on FOX News fighting for the SAVE Act.
Presler has been openly courting Nicki Minaj and the Barbz in his fight to get the legislation across the line ahead of the midterm elections, and his mention by SNS was notable. When Presler was tagged by SNS, along with the use of "us" in the effort to pass the SAVE Act, it was a cause for concern. SNS was asked directly if they work for the Republican Party and responded "I can't say much about what I do, but on X I'm simply a Barb account." When pressed further, asking why they couldn't simply confirm they're not working in service of the Republican Party, they responded "As I said, my Barb account has nothing to do with what I do professionally. On X, I'm simply a Barb."