Anna Paulina Luna’s response changed the equation
Minaj said her interest in Republicans grew stronger in 2025, when Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna offered assistance over the swatting issue.
“I was shocked,” Minaj told Time. “I’d never seen anyone in politics treat me that way. That’s what made me say that I don’t care to keep this a secret anymore.”
For Minaj, Luna’s response appears to have carried emotional weight because it contrasted sharply with what she says she received from Newsom. The sequence she described is simple enough: a security concern, an ignored request, then help from someone on the other side of the aisle.
She also said she had already been leaning toward Trump privately, but had held back from saying so in public because of the likely reaction from her audience and the music industry.
“I felt that way already about him, just that I didn’t dare act like that publicly,” she said. “It’s been ingrained in everyone’s brain in the music business that we are supposed to be a Democratic family. I just knew they would not like me supporting Trump.”
Why she brought Jay-Z and Obama into it
Minaj also pointed to Jay-Z as part of her political shift, arguing that the rapper’s relationship with former President Barack Obama had consequences inside hip-hop.
“I think Jay-Z ended up costing Obama a lot, whether he knows it or not,” she said. “Lots of rappers don’t like Jay-Z and were afraid to say it.”
Jay-Z and Obama have long had a public-facing friendship. Jay-Z campaigned for Obama, and Obama inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021. Minaj’s comment suggests she believes that alliance carried baggage among artists who did not want to say so publicly.
Her argument is less about one endorsement and more about a cultural expectation: that major figures in music are assumed to sit inside the Democratic tent. Minaj is now saying she did not feel that assumption matched what she was seeing or experiencing.
Obama’s 2024 Harris speech also bothered her
Minaj said another moment pushed her further away from the Democratic Party: a 2024 speech by Obama supporting Kamala Harris, in which he encouraged Black men to vote for a woman president.
“I just saw so many videos of Black men saying that they didn’t like the way they felt about that speech that Obama gave,” Minaj said. “They felt like they weren’t being listened to.”
That reaction, as she described it, added to her sense that Democrats were not hearing some voters clearly. Whether fans agree with her politics or not, Minaj is presenting her shift as something built through personal experience, industry pressure and frustration with how political messages land with real people.
For an artist with a large and divided fanbase, saying all of this out loud was always going to create noise. Minaj’s point is that she no longer wants to keep it private.
