Nicki Minaj became the punchline of the night at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner and she wasn’t even in the room when it happened.
Trump took the stage Friday at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C., three months after an alleged assassination attempt forced the original April dinner to shut down before it ever got going. While recounting the chaos of that April 25 night, when Secret Service rushed him out as gunfire erupted near a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton, the president worked a Nicki Minaj twerking joke into his remarks that had the crowd divided. “After hearing the gunshots, many people yelled, ‘Get down! Get down!’ which caused Nicki Minaj to start twerking,” Trump told the roughly 680-person crowd according to CNN. “She’s the only one that really understood what that meant.”
The joke had a layer most people caught: Nicki wasn’t even at the original dinner.
She’d been set to attend the April event as a Fox News guest, but she was running late and stuck in traffic when the shooting broke out outside the ballroom.
AllHipHop previously reported that she posted a TikTok video from inside a car moments after news of the shooting broke, captioning it with just a U.S. flag emoji and prayer hands.
She didn’t attend the rescheduled July 24 dinner either, which skipped its traditional red carpet and drew far fewer celebrities than the April event.
Still, Trump making her the centerpiece of a joke about one of the scariest nights of his presidency says everything about how tight their relationship has become in 2026.
At the January Trump Accounts Summit, Minaj told the crowd “I am probably the president’s No. 1 fan, and that’s not going to change. The hate, or what people have to say, it does not affect me at all. It actually motivates me to support him more.”
She stood on stage and held Trump’s hand in front of everyone.
Her most recent White House appearance came July 6, when Trump called her “so respected and so hot and so great and such a great friend of common sense” during a Rose Garden luncheon.
Nicki Minaj posted photos from the Oval Office and coined the hashtag #WhiteHouseBarbie.
The MAGA pivot started quietly in late 2025, when Minaj first praised Trump for raising awareness about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.
From there it accelerated fast through Turning Point USA, the Trump Accounts Summit, SpaceX in Texas, and the Rose Garden.
She’s also credited a series of swatting incidents at her Los Angeles home and what she described as Newsom completely ignoring her pleas for help as the moments that pushed her into Trump’s orbit.
The backlash from fans and the industry has not slowed her down at all.
The internet was split on Trump’s joke as expected. Some called it insensitive given the context of a real shooting.
Others said the timing landed and the crowd was reacting regardless. What’s hard to argue is that the joke wouldn’t land unless the entire room already understood exactly who Nicki Minaj is to Trump’s world right now, and they clearly do.
Trump later condemned political violence and honored Secret Service agent Victor Gonzales, who was injured stopping the gunman during the April attack.
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