Petty December is in full swing, and this beef between California Gov. Gavin Newsom and rapper Nicki Minaj just took it from funny to pretty disturbing. There’s a lot to process here, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll zoom in on the fact that we live in an era where rappers and politicians argue online about human rights.
When she rose to fame in 2010, Minaj represented everything that was exciting and subversive about hip-hop; she presented a counterweight to an industry that was seen by some as misogynistic and homophobic. She didn’t openly start dipping her toes in the conservative pond until 2021, when she claimed that the COVID vaccine made a cousin’s friend’s testicle “swollen.” There’ve been several more questionable shenanigans from her, including this past year the apparent allyship with Vice President JD Vance.
But Minaj’s character arc took an unsavory dip last month, when she backed President Donald Trump’s biased assertions that Nigerian Christians are facing a genocide. The Trump administration actually asked her to speak at the UN after that one. Since then, Minaj’s page on X has turned into somewhat of a Donald Trump stan account.
And finally, what all of that brings us to is last week’s weirdness, when Minaj tried to get at California’s charismatic Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on X. If you haven’t seen it, Newsom has been one of very few Democrats to successfully stand up to Trump, and his X account — which we suspect is run by a group of clever Gen Zs — has taken hilarious jabs at the president.
