“There she is, my favorite.” That was how Donald Trump greeted Nicki Minaj as she walked into the Oval Office, and the rapper has now made it clear she has no plans to leave his corner.
Trump didn’t stop at the compliment. “She’s been with me for a long time, I won’t say how long,” he added in the video, which has been making the rounds on social media.
Minaj saw the clip after a fan account reposted it on X. Her reply was short and left little room for interpretation: “Not going anywhere. Right where I need to be. 🙏🏽”
The Oval Office moment came during a trip to Washington, D.C., where Minaj was serving as a celebrity judge for the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Million Dollar Pitch Competition.
The event gave aspiring entrepreneurs the chance to pitch their business ideas to a panel, with five finalists competing for a combined $1 million in prize money.
She shared the judging table with Grant Cardone, Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia and actor Dean Cain. The top prize of $400,000 went to Plas Tech Tooling Inc., a plastic mold manufacturer based in Iowa.
This wasn’t a one time thing. In January, Minaj stood next to the president during an announcement promoting Trump Accounts, an investment initiative aimed at children, and over the summer she attended a luncheon in the White House Rose Garden.
For longtime fans, the warmth between the two is still hard to square with where Minaj stood a few years ago. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, she publicly criticized his administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border.
She spoke from personal experience. Minaj, who was born in Trinidad, wrote on Facebook at the time: “I came to this country as an illegal immigrant @ 5 years old. I can’t imagine the horror of being in a strange place & having my parents stripped away from me at the age of 5.”
That post drew on a part of her story she has never hidden. It’s also a big reason her alignment with the administration has drawn so much attention over the past year, as the Queens rapper, now 43, has gone from one of Trump’s critics to a recurring guest at his events.
Her response to the “favorite” clip frames all of this as a deliberate choice rather than a passing photo op. What she hasn’t done, at least not in that post, is explain how she squares her current position with the one she took in 2018.
That gap is where much of the conversation around her has settled. With three White House appearances in roughly a year and a public promise that she is “not going anywhere,” it looks unlikely this will be the last time Minaj turns up in Washington.
