Well, Nicki Minaj's MAGA Turn Makes a Lot More Sense Now

Some things in life are extremely good recession indicators: empty retail spaces; increases in egg prices; everyone pretending 2016 was a great year we should be nostalgic for. Another very helpful one is seeing increasingly irrelevant celebrities suddenly pretend that they’re big fans of Donald Trump. What’s that? You’re abandoning all your principles to suck up to that orange loser and it has nothing to do with the fact that going MAGA is the easiest grift in town? Groundbreaking. Nobody was surprised when Nicki Minaj decided to become Erika Kirk’s BFF and grovel at the feet of Trump. It was the inevitable endgame for a woman who has thrived on a potent combination of grievance politics, defending sex criminals, and Not Like Other Girls Syndrome. But it also felt like the most obvious sign that she was not doing great professionally. Well, that and her sudden obsession with AI. Lo and behold, we were right.

According to Billboard, Minaj is facing a lawsuit that claims she has stiffed a concert production company on $275,000 in fees, and that her reps just keep saying, “We’ll look into this.” In a lawsuit filed this Monday in New York, 24/7 Productions says that Minaj refused for years to reimburse the company for money it spent producing her performances at HeartRadio’s 2023 Jingle Ball concerts and later that year for her most recent album Pink Friday 2. “Despite many attempts over the course of nearly two years to ‘chase up’ payment of the 24/7 Invoices, defendants have inexplicably failed to pay any portion,” the company’s lawyers wrote in the complaint.

Yikes.

But this wasn’t the only financial issue Minaj has had in recent years. Minaj was sued by a former security guard who said that her husband, convicted sex criminal Kenneth Petty, attacked him and left him with a broken jaw. Minaj and Petty were ordered to pay $500,000 to the accuser, and after multiple attempts to claim his money failed, a judged planned to force the sale of her home to pay it. Earlier this year, she avoided having to sell her house and ponied up the cash for the guard. It only took a few years of being embarrassed over it. Did she always have the money and simply didn’t want to pay it, or did all that MAGA loving offer a solid cash-out to stave off her problems?

This is all a mess of Nicki’s own making, and her rightward swing won’t solve any of her issues. Trump fans don’t like her music, even when it was good (which it hasn’t been in a long time), and she’s never going to appeal to the losers who tried to start a war over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl gig. Her husband’s a creep without a job. Even some of the most die-hard Barbz are having their ‘are we the baddies’ realization. Rap is dominated by powerful and talented women who don’t spend their days getting mad that they’re not the only one in the game. Unless Trump makes it mandatory for people to buy her music, she has very little to gain from her MAGA era. Certainly, it won’t pay all her bills if people have to keep suing her like this.