President Trump made his first appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner since returning to office, and he used part of that stage time to turn Nicki Minaj into a punchline that has since split opinion right down the middle.
The dinner itself carried unusual weight this year. It was a rescheduled version of the original April gathering, which was abruptly interrupted when a gunman breached security and opened fire, sending attendees scrambling for cover.
Nicki Minaj had been scheduled to attend that first event but did not make it. Speaking at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington on July 24, Trump revisited the incident with a joke that referenced her directly.
“After hearing the gunshots, many people yelled, ‘Get down! Get down!’ Which caused Nicki Minaj to start twerking. Can you believe it? ‘Get down.’ She’s the only one that really understood what that meant.”
How I’ll be looking @ the President next time I see him. https://t.co/dVw3CpCqfP pic.twitter.com/jEUOdOjG3p
— Nicki Minaj (@NICKIMINAJ) July 25, 2026
The room reacted, though reports describe the broader speech as meandering, with Trump also taking shots at Rosie O’Donnell, Bette Midler, and Bruce Springsteen, and attendees visibly restless by the time he passed the twenty-minute mark.
Minaj wasn’t in the room to hear it live, having skipped the rescheduled dinner just as she had the original. But she wasn’t quiet about it either.
She responded on X with a photo of a pink-haired Chucky doll wearing a menacing grin, captioned “How I’ll be looking @ the President next time I see him.”
The reaction to the joke itself has been sharply divided. Critics online called it a rehash of a decades-old racial trope, one that reduces a Black woman’s presence at a formal event down to a hypersexualised punchline, with several commentators drawing direct comparisons to historical stereotypes about Black performers being expected to “entertain” regardless of context. Others read Minaj’s playful response as evidence she took the joke in stride rather than as an insult.
What makes the moment particularly loaded is the relationship behind it. Minaj has become one of Trump’s most visible Black celebrity supporters during his second term, a notable reversal from his first term, when she publicly criticised several of his immigration policies.
She has appeared at a White House Rose Garden event, posed with him in the Oval Office in a photo she captioned “WhiteHouseBarbie,” and even shared the stage with him at a Treasury Department event in January.
That proximity has already cost her some goodwill among longtime fans and drawn criticism from political figures who see her alliance with Trump as difficult to reconcile with her earlier positions.
This wasn’t even the first time Trump has singled her out publicly. He previously told a Black History Month reception audience “I love Nicki Minaj” and recounted asking her whether her nails were real, and at a separate event he reportedly referred to SBA head Kelly Loeffler as “Nicki Minaj” while Minaj herself was sitting in the room.
Whether Friday’s joke damages that relationship or simply becomes another strange footnote in an already unusual political alliance remains to be seen.
What’s clear is that Minaj, whatever she actually felt about being the punchline, wasn’t interested in letting the moment pass without a response of her own, even if that response came in the form of a horror-movie doll instead of a direct statement.
