Nicki Minaj, MAGA, and Grifting Without Selling Anything

MAGA culture-war messaging works best when it arrives through someone “above politics.” She gives it a microphone that doesn't look like a podium.

On December 12, Nicki Minaj posts to Twitter: “Imagine being the guy running on wanting to see trans kids. Haha. Not even a trans ADULT would run on that. Normal adults wake up & think they want to see HEALTHY, SAFE, HAPPY kids.” The target is California Governor Gavin Newsom. The context is a clip from The Ezra Klein Show where Newsom said, “I want to see trans kids. I have a trans godson. There’s no governor that’s done more pro-trans legislation than I have.” Minaj strips his statement of its meaning and repackages it as deviance. She adds: “The Gav Nots. GavOUT. Send in the next guy, I’m bored.”

A day later, she tweets again: “I think Gavvy’s still transitioning.”

This is the language of plausible deniability. Minaj can claim she’s joking, that she’s just being Nicki, that the Barbz know her humor. But the phrasing lands exactly where it’s meant to land. “Wanting to see trans kids” becomes predatory when severed from the sentence around it. “Still transitioning” turns gender identity into a punchline aimed at a cisgender man. The message doesn’t need to be coherent. It needs to circulate.

The question isn’t whether Minaj believes what she’s posting. The question is what function these posts serve, who benefits from them, and what she receives in exchange.

The term “grift” gets thrown around loosely, so here’s what it means in plain language: a grift is an exchange where someone trades credibility or access for personal benefit while obscuring the transaction. The classic MAGA grift involves selling products to a captive audience. Books about the stolen election. Supplements advertised on podcasts. Subscription services promising insider information. The grifter converts political attention into revenue.

Minaj isn’t selling anything. She hasn’t launched a supplement line or a Substack. She isn’t hawking merch with MAGA slogans. This makes her more useful to the apparatus, not less. She provides distribution without the smell of commerce. Her timeline functions as a signal boost that doesn’t look like advertising, a political endorsement that doesn’t look like a podium speech. The White House gets to use her songs on TikTok. Vice President JD Vance gets to post “Nicki > Cardi” and insert himself into a rap beef, looking human and online. Ambassador Mike Waltz gets to call her “arguably the greatest female recording artist” and stand next to her at the United Nations.

What does Minaj get? Access. Attention. Institutional validation during a period when her music career has stalled and her public reputation has cratered. Six weeks before the Newsom posts, she spoke at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations alongside Waltz and Trump advisor Alex Bruesewitz. The event was titled “Combatting Religious Violence and the Killing of Christians in Nigeria.” Bruesewitz, addressing the room, declared: “America is a Christian country. It was founded as a Christian country and it will always be a Christian country.”

This is the company she keeps now. This is the room she enters. After the UN appearance, Minaj posted a since-deleted tweet: “United Nations was a MAGA Flex. Trump on da text. Yall should be afraid of what I’m gon do next.” The line flips a JAY-Z bar from 2009, when he rapped “Obama on the text.” The flex is the access itself.

The transaction works because celebrity attention operates differently than political attention. When a senator tweets about trans athletes, it registers as partisan combat. When Minaj does it, the post moves through entertainment channels, gossip blogs, stan accounts, and group chats where policy rarely enters. The message reaches people who would never watch a congressional hearing or read a policy brief. This is how culture-war rhetoric gets laundered: through figures who can claim they’re just speaking their mind, just asking questions, just being real.

Minaj’s posts about trans youth follow a specific pattern. She invokes children’s safety while targeting a population that represents a fraction of a percent of young people. “HEALTHY, SAFE, HAPPY kids,” she writes, as if trans children are a threat to those conditions rather than kids seeking them. The framing positions trans youth as a problem to be solved rather than people to be protected. It echoes, almost verbatim, the language deployed in state legislatures to ban gender-affirming care and restrict bathroom access and remove books from libraries.

The “protect the children” framework has a long history in American moral panics. It doesn’t require evidence of harm. It requires only the implication of danger, the suggestion of adult corruption. When Minaj writes that “not even a trans ADULT would run on that,” she’s collapsing Newsom’s support for trans people into something unspeakable. The logic is guilt by association, stretched until association becomes accusation.

None of this requires Minaj to articulate a policy position. She doesn’t have to explain what she thinks should happen to trans kids in schools, sports, or medical settings. She supplies the effect without the argument. The posts are sarcasm-forward, meme-ready, structured for engagement rather than persuasion. They don’t need to convince anyone of anything. They need to move.

On November 12, Minaj reposted a White House TikTok set to her song “Va Va Voom.” The video listed Trump’s accomplishments: “A President who prioritizes Americans. No men in women’s sports. Border is closed. Our cities are safer than ever. Criminal illegals are being deported.” She added no commentary. The repost was the endorsement. A White House spokesperson responded: “We are grateful that Nicki Minaj is using her platform to speak out on these atrocities, only proving what Barbz have known all along: she is Super-Based.”

The word “Super-Based” does a lot of work there. It translates Minaj into MAGA vernacular, claims her fanbase as fellow travelers, and flatters her simultaneously. The statement comes from the same administration whose executive orders target trans students’ bathroom access and threaten to withdraw federal funding from schools that use students’ chosen names. Minaj’s repost puts her imprimatur on that agenda without requiring her to say she supports it.

This is what it looks like when a superstar amplifies state power with her own brand attached. The state gets reach. The celebrity gets relevance. The target gets smaller. Trans kids don’t have PR teams or UN invitations. They can’t “clap back” at Minaj with an Instagram reel. They exist largely outside the discourse that invokes them, useful as symbols, absent as people.

Minaj’s praise of Vance follows the same structure as her attacks on Newsom. On December 11, she calls the Vice President “an assassin” and writes: “Quick as a computer. Maybe quicker. He’s the best blend I’ve ever seen of us&them.” The compliment is pure affect. It positions Vance as cool, dangerous, and relatable. It doesn’t engage with anything he’s done or plans to do. Vance responds by weighing in on the Nicki-Cardi beef, and Mike Waltz quote-tweets him: “VP of the Barbs!”

The ecosystem feeds itself. Each post generates coverage. Each clap-back extends the news cycle. The underlying policy disappears into the content churn. What remains is the sense that something is happening, that sides are being chosen, that Minaj is in on something the rest of us aren’t.

Whether she believes any of it is unknowable and ultimately beside the point. The behavior is the evidence. The posts are the product. The platform she built over fifteen years now routes traffic to a political operation that targets some of the most vulnerable people in the country. She hasn’t sold them a single thing. That’s what makes it work.