Nicki Minaj Rides Air Force One to Michigan, Tells Voters to Ignore the 'Fake' Polls

Nicki Minaj, the Queens-raised rap star who calls herself President Trump's number one fan, flew to Michigan on Air Force One on Sunday for his rally in Port Huron, nine days before the midterms. Somewhere over the Great Lakes she sat down with White House communications director Steven Cheung and delivered a better closing argument than half the Republican Party has managed all year.

Her message on the polls showing Democrats ahead: "Well, let's ask Hillary Clinton how the fake polls, how fake the fake polls are. We don't pay those polls any mind. Obviously, they are there to deter our voters."

Cheung posted the sit-down to 𝕏 with a wink: "Ladies and gentlemen, I think we may have found the new White House Press Secretary!" (Steven Cheung). The official White House account answered with a pair of eyes. Minaj had already posted her own selfie video from the jet, tagged #AirForceOneBARBIE (Nicki Minaj). That one passed 1.2 million views in a few hours.

What she actually said. Most of the coverage grabbed one spicy line and ran. Here's the full pitch, in order. On Trump and the rest of the world: "He's very tough. He's tough internationally. He tells them what we need, not what they need. We're not going to be paid to kiss their a**, okay? They are going to pay us to be affiliated with the United States of America."

Asked whether anyone works harder on the trail, she said: "Absolutely not. You have a man who's won three elections. Legacy media continues to attack him left and right. And what does he do? He wakes up at four o'clock in the morning. He outworks people that are half his age."

Then the part that matters most for a midterm: "He knows that he would be fine. He can kick his feet up and just chill out for the rest of his presidency. But no, he's paying it forward. He's thinking about the other Republicans that have to win during these elections. And so that tells me that he's a great guy."

That's the whole case in plain English. Trump isn't on the ballot. He's flying around the country anyway, because a president with a hostile Congress spends his last two years fighting subpoenas instead of passing anything. Minaj gets that. Plenty of donors don't.

Why Port Huron, and why her. Port Huron sits at the top of the Blue Water Bridge to Canada, in St. Clair County, solid Trump country in a state he carried in 2024. The local paper MLive reports he's the first sitting president ever to visit the city or the county. The rally is for former congressman and FBI agent Mike Rogers, running for the open Senate seat Democrat Gary Peters is giving up, and for John James, the Republican nominee for governor.

The stakes are real. Rogers lost Michigan's 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin by about 19,000 votes out of 5.5 million cast, per the Michigan Secretary of State, on the same ballot where Trump carried the state. That's a coin flip that landed on its edge. His opponent this time is Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Democrat whom Barack Obama rallied for in Detroit just yesterday. We covered that pitch here.

So Obama brings the nostalgia, and Trump brings a rap superstar who can reach young Black and Caribbean voters that no Republican consultant has a phone number for. It's not a gimmick. It's a turnout play aimed at people who don't watch Sunday shows.

She's not new to this. Minaj's turn didn't start this weekend. It's been building all year, out in the open, on her own account.

In January she joined Trump onstage in Washington to push Trump Accounts, the new savings accounts created by last year's big tax law that give every American baby born from 2025 through 2028 a $1,000 federal deposit to grow until adulthood. The same day she posted a photo of her Trump gold card with one word, "Welp...", and drew 20 million views. In July it was lunch at the White House: "#WhiteHouseBarbie with her favorite President of all time!!!" Last Tuesday Trump greeted her in the Oval Office as "my favorite," and she posted, "Not going anywhere. Right where I need to be."

Hollywood spent a decade telling artists that backing Trump ends a career. One of the best-selling female rappers alive just rode his plane to a campaign stop and joked about becoming press secretary. That rule is dead.

What the president told the crowd. Trump took the stage at McMorran Place a little after the scheduled start and went straight at the stakes. "Americans did not spend all these years fighting communists and terrorists in order to watch it all burn down," he said in a line the White House's rapid response team clipped as he spoke. He was still going as this report went up.

What comes next. Michigan's early voting is underway now, and Election Day is Nov. 3. Rogers-El-Sayed is one of the handful of races that decides who controls the Senate for Trump's final two years. Minaj made the argument for those two years better than any ad buy: the man could coast, and he isn't. The question for Michigan is whether the voters she reached feel the same way.