Why the Hell Is JD Vance Quoting Nicki Minaj Now?

We bet you didn’t have this on your 2025 bingo card: Vice President JD Vance just quoted rapper Nicki Minaj defending white people.

Following Minaj’s appearance at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest this weekend, Vance took to X Monday to tout that he’d finally found an actually famous person willing to be publicly associated with MAGA’s hate-fueled brand of conservative politics.

“Nicki Minaj said something at Amfest that was really profound. I’m paraphrasing, but she said, ‘just because I want little black girls to think they’re beautiful doesn’t mean I need to put down little girls with blonde hair and blue eyes,’” Vance wrote in a post on X Monday. “We all got wrapped up over the last few years in zero sum thinking. This was because the people who think they rule the world pit us against one another.”

Minaj’s actual comment was about Black women not replicating the discrimination they’d experienced for their appearances. “We were not being represented and not being admired for our beauty. If we felt like that as Black women, why would we want to do that to other women? Why would we now need to make other people downplay their beauty, so that we can feel—no that’s not how it works. I don’t need someone with blonde hair and blue eyes to downplay their beauty because I know my beauty,” she said.

It’s no surprise that this particular message stuck with Vance. The vice president has repeatedly commented, with no sense of irony whatsoever, on how he doesn’t want to feel sorry for being white anymore.

To be clear, in the United States white households have more than three times the wealth of Black or Hispanic households, and white men have always enjoyed a majority control over the country’s politics. It is the weakest among them—like Vance—who view the empowerment of people who have been systemically disadvantaged as a threat.

Vance readily complains about feeling put down by the attitudes of “people who think they rule the world,” while making racist jokes from his perch as the second most powerful man in the country.

Unfortunately for MAGA, Minaj is far from the perfect spokesperson. While speaking on stage at AmericaFest, the rapper gushed over the vice president, referring to Vance as an “assassin.” This wouldn’t have been notable except that she was speaking to Erika Kirk at the time, whose husband was actually assassinated earlier this year. Yikes.

But other high-profile celebrities haven’t been willing to play ball. Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and SZA have all slammed the White House for using their music in order to dress-up their ghoulish policies for a younger audience.