Kathy Hochul didn’t let it slide. Asked about Nicki Minaj’s latest posts during a campaign stop, the New York governor suggested the rapper’s mind had been “poisoned” by Donald Trump.
The back and forth kicked off Wednesday, when Minaj fired off a string of posts on X branding Hochul an “evil woman.” She urged New Yorkers to back Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman in the Nov. 3 gubernatorial election. “
The Democratic Party should forfeit her seat because even if she wins, she will be of great consequence to them,” she wrote. “She will not escape God’s wrath.”
Minaj aimed her message squarely at Black voters and Christians. She reposted a clip of Hochul’s 2024 remark that there were “Black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word ‘computer’ is.” The governor apologized at the time, saying she “misspoke, and I regret it.”
That apology clearly didn’t land with Minaj. “How dare you as black people vote for this vile wicked curse of a woman? How dare you as Christians?!” she wrote in all caps, signing off with “Vote Blakeman!”
She also dug up a 2025 video from True Bethel Baptist Church, where Hochul joked to a mostly Black congregation while promoting her inflation rebate.
“Don’t stop by the liquor store, OK? Buy something for the kids,” Hochul said, adding that she sometimes stops by too.
The church’s bishop defended the comment back then as being in the context of his sermon, but Minaj’s response was simply, “Dear God, help us.
Hochul’s reply leaned hard into the Trump angle. “I don’t play games in this business. This is serious,” she said, adding that she hoped for “a reawakening” once “MAGA world has vanished, and they go back into their dark holes where they came from.”
“Being an outlier right now, that’s her choice,” the governor added. When someone asked if she’d welcome a Cardi B endorsement, Hochul brushed off the idea that this was turning into a celebrity rivalry.
Online, the reaction split along familiar lines. One supporter wrote, “Exactly, that’s how you are supposed to answer,” while another argued voters should focus on “the resume of said elected official and not that of any ‘celebrity.'”
Minaj’s side seized on the “dark holes” line. “You just told a large percentage of your constituents they need to go back to the ‘dark hole they came from’,” one user wrote. “Which party is causing the divide again?”
This is far from Minaj’s first public step toward Trump. She held hands with him onstage at the Treasury Department’s Trump Accounts Summit in January.
On Oct. 25, he brought her up at a Port Huron, Michigan rally for Senate hopeful Mike Rogers and gubernatorial candidate John James.
“If you run again, I will support you again,” she told him there, though the 22nd Amendment bars a third term. Fox News Digital says it reached out to both Minaj and Hochul for comment.
With Nov. 3 closing in, neither side looks ready to drop it.
