As a Black woman who grew up with Nicki Minaj’s mixtapes on repeat, her brazen confidence felt like a playbook, a way to be seen, loud and unashamed in rooms that rarely made space for me. Minaj’s public persona wields influence over young Black and LGBTQ+ fans, whose identification with her transforms entertainment and celebrity spectacle into a conduit for political attitudes and norms.
Minaj’s public turn towards conservatism is not solely about policy endorsement but an affective cycle of perceived disrespect. The victim is not Minaj, but the Black and LGBTQ+ youth who have formed a parasocial relationship with her and are being encouraged to vote against their best interests.
The tendency to treat politics as spectacle, converting real-world stakes into performative entertainment, appears early in Minaj’s responses to Trump and helps explain why her remarks often read as theatrical rather than deliberative. In the wake of President Trump announcing his first run for president in June 2015, Minaj commented on the “hilarious” campaign to Billboard Magazine. Although the interview occurred in November 2015, before Trump proposed a Muslim ban, he had already promoted harsh racialized immigration rhetoric. Minaj responded by framing him as entertainment, calling his campaign “the ultimate reality show” and treating his candidacy as a spectacle rather than a political threat, despite the policies already circulating.
After Trump was elected, Minaj ridiculed his immigration stance in her “Black Barbies” freestyle and made a more direct critique in June 2018 via Facebook, writing about her own experience immigrating at age 5 and urging an end to family separation. Here, she adopts a more empathetic stance, linking personal narrative to broader pro-immigrant discourse among young audiences.
After Trump’s first term ended, her focus shifted toward public health, specifically the COVID-19 vaccine. On September 13, 2021, she posted on X recounting an anecdote about vaccine side effects. This personal skepticism illustrates how Minaj’s political takes often emerge through storytelling, social networks, and viral circulation rather than policy analysis. That anecdotal approach parallels how she manages threats to status: personal narrative and parasocial loyalty, rather than institutional argument, shape her responses.
Minaj has also been fiercely protective of her position in the industry, marked by chart dominance, sales success and cultural visibility. Rivalries with Lil’ Kim and Remy Ma helped consolidate her authority within rap, while later tensions with Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion reflected challenges to that centrality. In January 2024, following Megan Thee Stallion’s release of “Hiss,” which referenced Megan’s Law, Minaj interpreted the lyric as directed at her family and responded days later with “Big Foot.” The song attacked Megan’s credibility and trauma, yet failed to resonate commercially. More significant was the message communicated to fans: perceived disrespect justifies public humiliation. Even without artistic impact, the rhetorical lesson circulated, mockery and retaliation become acceptable defenses of threatened status.
Minaj’s commitment to craft and dominance positioned her as the genre’s symbolic center, reinforced by the inclusive identity of the fanbase, the Barbs. But as the sound and discourse of rap shifted and newer artists gained prominence, she increasingly framed this transition as a sign of disrespect. Rather than recalibrating, she externalized blame onto peers while receiving validation from online supporters, reducing industry competition into a narrative of personal grievance.
This cycle echoes MAGA rhetoric. Contemporary right-wing grievance politics often emerge from perceived displacement within a majority white heterosexual patriarchal order, producing narratives of disrespect, blame shifting and validation by their community. This parallel does not suggest equivalence between Minaj and the white majority; it reveals how one can rhetorically structure their personal grievance to echo broader reactionary narratives. In Minaj’s case, chart defensiveness, conspiratorial framing of criticism and vaccine commentary operate less as policy interventions than as symptoms of melancholic displacement. She manages a loss of symbolic centrality by mistrusting institutions and aligning with validating counterpublics online. The internet accelerates this process, transforming individualized resentment into political identification and making spaces like Turning Point a symbolic site where artists can reframe injury as ideological resistance.
As someone who grew up watching Minaj shape the landscape of mainstream rap and online fandom culture, this rhetorical shift feels consequential rather than abstract. Her persona helped define how my generation understood confidence, spectacle and digital community. Now, seeing that same influence mobilize grievance-centered discourse underscores how easily entertainment logics bleed into political identification.
Some argue that Minaj’s claims are an expression of free speech and that other celebrities should not bow to leftist discourse. Celebrities can apologize for past beliefs, as Kanye West recently did. We can read Minaj’s positioning less as a mode of indoctrination and more as an expression of artistic autonomy within a pluralistic cultural sphere.
However, I believe it is important to recognize that celebrities are hypervisible cultural products that cannot remain neutral. The rhetoric they use circulates and can shape the way audiences view the world. Social media and parasocial identification amplify this circulation, and research indicates that youth voting shifted to the right in 2024, influenced by media ecosystems. Minaj’s platform demonstrates how such rhetoric can reach specific demographics, particularly Black and LGBTQ+ young listeners, drawing them into narratives of grievance and blame shifting.
If we don’t teach critical media literacy, the parasocial power of curated personas will continue to steer youth toward spectacle, grievance and ideological alignment rather than independent thought. I grew up quoting her bars and learning how to perform confidence; I don’t want those lessons to calcify into a politics of resentment. Teaching young people to read spectacle, to ask who benefits from a story and to separate admiration from political instruction is the smallest act of care we can offer the next generation of fans.
Contact Mickayla (MJ) Jones at mjones4@oxy.edu
