Fact Check: Did Nicki Minaj endorse Donald Trump in 2024? Viral video claim explored

On October 28, a rumor surfaced online claiming Nicki Minaj has endorsed Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential election. It first emerged on X as a video where the rapper was heard talking to a man, seemingly her husband, Kenneth Petty.

She was heard addressing the man in the clip as “Chucky” and thanked him for getting her a green card and American citizenship.

“Because you’re an American, I can now fill out paperwork and vote in the United States of America of Donald Trump, and I would like to thank my fans and everybody that supported me,” Minaj said in the footage.

However, the now-viral video is old and not from the ongoing 2024 election cycle. Per Times Now, Donald Trump supporter and podcaster Rob Smith clarified that the video was from 2019.

"OK UPDATE: Apparently this is from 2019 from when Trump was President, the first time. Sorry for the Fake News! Let’s keep hope alive for next time!," Smith wrote in a now-deleted tweet.

Nicki Minaj is not a U.S. citizen, as she has pointed out several times, including during a TikTok Live session last month.

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Nicki Minaj did not endorse Donald Trump in 2024

On Monday, a video emerged online where rapper Nicki Minaj was heard talking about being a green card holder and an American citizen with the right to vote, with her choice being Republican candidate Donald Trump.

While conservatives hailed it as an endorsement for the current election season, the video with animated filters was identified as over five years old, when Trump was the sitting president.

The video was seemingly made as a Halloween joke over Snapchat. In fact, recently, Nicki Minaj admitted that she was not a U.S. citizen and therefore had no right to vote.

In September 2024, the Anaconda hitmaker appeared on TikTok Live and revealed surprising details about her immigration status. While talking to a fan who was seemingly asking for her help about some kind of trouble he was in, she said:

“I’m not a citizen of America. Isn’t that crazy?... I was born on a beautiful island called Trinidad and Tobago. But I’ve been in the States for many years. You would think that with the millions of dollars that I’ve paid in taxes to this country that I would have been given an honorary citizenship many, many, many thousands of years ago.”

Before that, in 2018, Nicki Minaj mentioned similar details on Instagram while advocating for immigration rights. She shared how she came to the USA as an “illegal immigrant” when she was five years old in a post with pictures of an immigration shelter.

“I can’t imagine the horror of being in a strange place and having my parents stripped away from me at the age of 5. This is so scary to me. Please stop this. Can you try to imagine the terror & panic these kids feel right now? Not knowing if their parents are dead or alive if they’ll ever see them again,” she wrote at the time.

At the time, she had called out the Trump administration for its immigration policies, especially at the US-Mexican border.