On Wednesday, Nicki Minaj tweeted that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is currently running for reelection, is an “evil woman,” endorsed Hochul’s Republican opponent, and suggested Democrats should “forfeit her seat” even if she wins. Three days earlier, Minaj appeared at a Michigan campaign rally — ostensibly on behalf of local Republicans — but spent most of her speech gushing over President Donald Trump, whom she vowed to support “forever and ever.”

Minaj’s MAGA makeover is now so well established that it’s easy to forget it’s a bit of an about-face. In 2018, Minaj used the same social media account to endorse Hochul for lieutenant governor on a ticket with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and condemned Trump’s immigration policy, describing herself as a former “illegal immigrant.” Today, Hochul’s still on the same political page and Trump’s immigration policy is no less cruel. So what could have led to this change?

Minaj’s political conversion sure can seem a lot less about ideology than geography — that is, who holds pardon powers and where. The Queens, New York-reared rapper has two close family members with criminal convictions, and the only politicians capable of granting them clemency happen to be the governor of New York and the president of the United States.

It’s true that Minaj has, in the past, espoused an ideologically incoherent, if MAGA-leaning outlook — including vaccine hesitancy, persecutory delusion, Christian hypocrisy — before she fully embraced her current conservative boosterism.

Though there’s no public evidence that Minaj has requested pardons in either case, I’m hardly the first to make the connection. It’s apparently been brought up enough that in May, Trump advisor Alex Bruesewitz bothered to call the suggestion a “disgusting and disgraceful smear” on social media, adding that “Nicki has never once asked the President for anything. She has only offered assistance and support. The insinuation that she’s looking for anything in return is total garbage.”

Kenneth Petty, Minaj’s husband, pleaded guilty at the age of 16 to attempted rape; in 1995, he was convicted of mulitple charges related to that assault and served four and a half years in prison. In November 2019, Petty — now married to Minaj and living in California — was pulled over in Beverly Hills for a traffic violation. That’s when authorities discovered he had not registered in the state as a sex offender, a federal violation under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act. Because that failure to register is a federal crime, only the president can pardon it.

Minaj’s older brother, Jelani Maraj, is currently serving 25 years to life after being convicted of repeatedly raping his 11-year-old stepdaughter. Those assaults allegedly took place at his house in Long Island, and the trials were consequently held in New York state courts. That means the only person who could grant Minaj’s sibling clemency is the governor of New York.

One relative needs Trump. The other needs Hochul or, perhaps, for Hochul to be defeated so a Trump-compliant Republican governor can step in. Maybe it’s just a crazy coincidence that Onika Tanya Maraj, aka Nicki Minaj, has spent the last year calling herself Trump’s “number one fan” and pledging — as she did in Michigan on Sunday — to support the president if he undertakes an illegal third-term run. It’s possible that Minaj’s professed grievance about Hochul saying in 2024 that Black kids in the Bronx “don’t even know what the word ‘computer’ is,” is real. Although, that would mean it took her two years to learn of it and suggests she’s unaware that the governor apologized for that absolute gaffe almost immediately. (I mean, in just the past week the Trump White House has posted a neo-Nazi slogan and a racist Jack-o-Lantern to social media, making Minaj’s supposed outrage at bigotry seem a little…selective.)

It’s also true that Minaj has, in the past, espoused  an ideologically incoherent, if MAGA-leaning outlook — including vaccine hesitancy, persecutory delusion, Christian hypocrisy — before she fully embraced her current conservative boosterism.

Sure. I am not a seer, nor am I a mind reader. But I have read the clemency statutes, and they would certainly explain the calculations undergirding this new political stridency we’ve seen from the Trinidad and & Tobago-born Minaj — who, as recently as January, shared that she still isn’t an American citizen and therefore can’t vote U.S. elections.

But that’s not the sort of thing Trump would get hung up on in any case. This is a president whose pay-to-play approach in all things has led to such prolific pardon-peddling that it’s been dubbed a “pardon economy.” (The White House denied it is influenced by “pardon brokers.”)

There is now an entire ecosystem of political fixers, lobbyists, lawyers and other corrupt brokers who charge exorbitant fees for the promise of presidential pardons, at least 1,700 of which Trump have been granted across his two terms. Rapper Boosie Badazz said he was swindled out of $600,000 by two operatives, who never delivered on the pardon. (Both vigorously denied the allegation.)

And what does Trump get in return?

The optics of having A Very Famous Black Person with Street Cred — a former critic, even — performing public displays of loyalty.

Minaj becomes his evidence, to black voters, of how wrong they are about how beloved he is among them, while also serving as the reason they should vote for him. Her tweet aboard Air Force One, and the accompanying staged video-op that led to headlines suggesting she was being considered as the next press secretary? That, too, was a joke — which the Trump administration thinks it’s playing on what it considers America’s dumbest electorate: black voters.

Asked about Minaj’s hostile tweets by the media on Thursday, Hochul touted the rapper’s 2018 endorsement and suggested — not for the first time — that MAGA has been bad for her brain.

“You can ask her how she’s been poisoned by Donald Trump,” the governor stated. “That is an issue she has to deal with, and after Donald Trump and MAGA world has vanished and they go back into their dark holes where they came from, hopefully we can have a reawakening and people like her and others will realize that they were fed a vision of this country that is not what Americans feel. And so being an outlier right now, that’s her choice. And I’ll just say, too much time at Trump rallies is pretty bad for people’s mental health.”

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