President Donald Trump boasted about his support from Nicki Minaj’s “community” during a speech he delivered Wednesday. And experts in political science, African American studies and race reveal what they believe is behind the president’s “awkward” quip.

Trump was speaking at a summit celebrating his administration’s launch of investment accounts for children called “Trump Accounts” when he announced that the “Super Freaky Girl” rapper was in attendance. He told the crowd that Minaj had pledged to invest “hundreds of thousands of dollars in Trump accounts” to support the future children of her fans.

The president then emphasized that Minaj — who has publicly aligned herself with the MAGA movement in recent months despite her past criticism of Trump — is a “big Trump supporter and Trump fan.”

He said that the rapper, who is Black, had taken “a little heat on occasion” from her “community,” before he appeared to reverse course. “She took a little heat on occasion. Her community isn’t necessaril— I tell ya, we did pretty damn well with your community, as we say,” he said, while speaking directly to Minaj before he invited her to the stage.

Trump didn’t elaborate on Minaj’s “community,” but he has a history of boasting about his support from Black communities.

“I got the biggest vote with Black people. They know a scam better than anybody. They know what it is to be scammed,” he said at the time.

Trump made inroads with Black voters in 2024, but exit polls have shown that Black voters still overwhelmingly voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris. According to an NBC News exit poll, 86% of Black voters picked Harris, with the support of 77% of Black male voters and 92% of Black female voters.

Alvin B. Tillery Jr., a professor of political science and African American studies at Northwestern University, said that when Trump refers to Minaj’s “community,” he’s “almost certainly signaling Blackness — both hers and, by extension, his supposed connection to Black voters.”

“That move matters because it reveals how instrumental he views her presence,” he told HuffPost. “He’s not primarily engaging Minaj as an artist, a cultural critic or even an independent political actor; he’s treating her as a conduit to a racialized audience he knows he struggles to reach.”

Win McNamee via Getty Images

Nicki Minaj and President Donald Trump appear onstage Wednesday at an event celebrating the launch of "Trump Accounts" in Washington, DC.

Trump’s ‘community’ quip was ‘transactional’ — and it says a lot about his views on whiteness, experts say.

Tillery believes Trump’s remarks about Minaj’s “community” were an example of “othering” — meaning the president views whiteness as universal.

“By emphasizing her ‘community,’ Trump implicitly marks her as outside the default political mainstream — the community rather than our community,” he said. “It’s a familiar pattern in his rhetoric: Whiteness is unmarked and universal, while Blackness is highlighted, named and mobilized when useful.”

“Minaj’s value, in this framing, is less about what she says and more about what she symbolizes — visibility, authenticity and cultural access to Black voters Trump knows he lacks organically,” he added.

When Minaj took the stage at Wednesday’s summit, she proclaimed to be the president’s “No.1 fan.”

Kari J. Winter, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo whose expertise includes gender, feminism, race and class, called Trump’s remarks and the exchange between him and Minaj onstage “so cringe and shameless.”

“The blatantly transactional nature of the staged exchange of hyperbolic praise between Trump and Minaj is so cringe and shameless as to defy description,” she said. “I would think that anyone watching it would be revolted.”

“Trump revels in being around wealthy people, but he never forgets the color of their skin, as we can see in his awkward, non-sequitur comments about Minaj’s ‘community,’” she later continued. “He likes staging mutual-admiration moments with women and people of color to lightly veil his relentlessly misogynistic and racist policies and habits.”

Trump ‘absolutely exaggerates’ his support from Black communities, Tillery says.

“Trump absolutely exaggerates his support among Black voters. It’s true that he made some marginal gains — particularly among Black men — but those gains are routinely overstated to obscure a basic reality: An overwhelming majority of Black voters, men and women alike, supported Kamala Harris,” Tillery said. “That’s consistent with decades of voting behavior and with how Black voters have evaluated Trump’s record and rhetoric.”

Tillery said that the issue isn’t just that Trump often exaggerates the support he’s received from Black communities — it’s the performance behind it.

“Trump often boasts about having Black supporters in ways that feel less like coalition-building and more like validation-seeking,” he said. “When he does this in front of Black audiences, it can come off as patronizing, even transactional: ‘Look, I’ve got some of you on my side.’”

“That posture reinforces the sense that Black support is something to be displayed or counted, not meaningfully engaged. It’s politics as optics, not politics as representation,” he continued.

Shaun Harper, a professor of public policy, business and education at the University of Southern California, questioned why Trump didn’t explicitly say Black people instead of “community” in the first place. He noted that Minaj represents many things, i.e. she’s Black, a woman, a mother, a rapper and an immigrant.

Nonetheless, Harper said, Trump is “delusional” about the support he received from Black voters in 2024.

“Trump remains delusional about how many Black people voted for him in the 2024 presidential election,” he said. “More than 83% of us voted for Kamala Harris. Those are the facts.”

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images

Nicki Minaj laughs in the audience as President Donald Trump speaks onstage Wednesday at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

MAGA’s sudden enthusiasm for Minaj appears strategic, experts say.

Trump and members of his administration have not missed the opportunity this week to flaunt Minaj’s enthusiastic support.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared a TikTok video on X, formerly Twitter, showing Minaj calling Trump her “favorite president” and “the best president of all time.” Trump then appears in the video calling Minaj “the queen of rap.” Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, shared a video on X of her and the rapper taking part in a viral TikTok trend. Minaj is set to appear Tuesday on Miller’s podcast.

Minaj has also been a topic on Fox News.

During a segment on Fox News’ “Ingraham Angle” on Wednesday, host Laura Ingraham and Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) discussed Minaj and Trump’s appearance together earlier that day.

Ingraham noted that conservatives had previously complained about some of the lyrics in her songs, like the song “WAP” — except that’s not Minaj’s song. The 2020 hit song featuring Megan Thee Stallion was released by Cardi B.

The Fox News host went on to say that Minaj is “now bridging this gap from her world to Trump world.”

Winter said that Ingraham’s on-air gaffe was quite “revealing.”

“Ingraham’s confusion between Minaj, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion might be intentional or accidental, but in either case it signals to her audience that she does not know or care who Minaj is or what her music is about,” she said. “Minaj is a stand-in for ‘Black female entertainer’ who is, in Ingraham’s rhetoric, obviously morally inferior to people like herself. ”

Winter added that Ingraham gave Minaj a “patronizing shout-out” as a reward for her “obsequious praise of Trump.”

Harper said that he respects Minaj’s choice to embrace Trump and that she doesn’t have to make the same political choices as he does. But he also questioned “how many MAGA Republicans will buy Minaj’s next album.”

“How many of them can name three Nicki Minaj songs? They are profiting from using her as a mascot,” he said. “Perhaps she will somehow profit. But I comfortably predict that it won’t be through album sales, streaming numbers and concert tickets.”

Tillery believes that MAGA’s recent excitement over Minaj is all a part of a strategy.

“The administration’s sudden enthusiasm for Minaj tells us a lot about its media strategy —and its anxieties,” he said. “Promoting her aggressively is a low-cost way to signal cultural relevance and racial outreach without changing policy positions that remain deeply unpopular with most Black voters.”

And Ingraham’s “WAP” mix-up is further proof that the right’s enthusiasm isn’t about understanding hip-hop culture — “it’s about using it,” he said.

Tillery also pointed out that there’s irony in MAGA’s celebration of Minaj’s support.

“Conservatives routinely rail against ‘Hollywood elites’ and celebrity political interventions — except when a celebrity can be framed as validating Trump,” he said. “At that point, the critique disappears.”

Tillery said that overall, the right’s excitement about Minaj is less about the rapper herself and more about what she represents: “A symbolic breach in the Democratic Party’s longstanding relationship with Black voters.”

“The problem for Trump is that symbolism can’t substitute for substance — and Black voters, by and large, continue to vote as if they know the difference,” he said.