Nicki Minaj Says “God Is Protecting Trump” in Weird Press Conference

Nicki Minaj, the once-iconic rapper turned MAGA pawn, went onstage at President Trump’s “Trump Accounts” event on Wednesday to deliver a message that was as brief as it was bizarre.

“I’d like to ask you to come up, Nicki, come on up.… She’s been such a great supporter, and a great supporter of Trump Accounts,” the president proclaimed. “And I said, ‘I’m gonna let my nails grow, because I love those nails. I’m gonna let those nails grow.’ She’s so good. She’s been MAGA, what can I say?”

Minaj eventually made it onstage, wearing a large white fur coat.

“Hello! I don’t know what to say, but I will say that I am probably the president’s number one fan,” said Minaj, with Trump and Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary flanking her as the microphone blocked most of her face. “And that’s not going to change. And the hate, or what people have to say—it does not affect me at all. It actually motivates me to support him more, and it’s gonna motivate all of us to support him more.

“We’re not gonna let them get away with bullying him, and the smear campaigns, it’s not going to work, OK?” she continued. “He has a lot of force behind him, and God is protecting him. Amen?” She then left the stage, as Trump invited more and more people onstage to speak in awkward, 30-second intervals.

Minaj was allegedly supposed to be there to announce a massive investment into the so-called “Trump Accounts,” a sort of warped trust-fund situation in which kids born in zip codes under the median-income threshold between 2025 and 2028 get a $1,000 federal contribution that tracks to the U.S. stock index and will become available when they turn 18. But Minaj made no mention of it.

This is at least the third public appearance Minaj has made in support of the Trump administration and the larger MAGA movement. Last November, she joined Ambassador Mike Waltz to spread misinformed claims of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria. In December, she joined Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk, at the Turning Point USA Conference, stating they were all “the cool kids.” And now there’s this weird little moment.

Donald Trump’s state of mind left the prime minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, very concerned after they met earlier this month.

Fico told European Union leaders at a summit last week that he was worried about Trump’s “psychological state,” saying that the president came across as “dangerous” during a meeting the pair had on January 17 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fico made the comments last Thursday at an emergency EU summit over Trump’s threats to annex Greenland.

Diplomats present at the meeting confirmed Fico’s comments to Politico, but said they didn’t know what Trump said that alarmed Fico. The Slovakian leader is a staunch supporter of Trump, praising him for his stances on the Russia-Ukraine war and telling Americans at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year that “your president is doing Europe a great service.”

Fico denied Politico’s report in an X post Wednesday morning, saying that “no one heard anything, no one saw anything, there are no witnesses, but nothing prevented the POLITICO portal from coming up with lies.” The White House has also denied the report, calling it “absolutely total fake news.”

But the report, which Politico confirmed with diplomats from four different EU countries as well as a senior EU official, is corroborated by multiple instances of Trump’s cognitive decline. He forgot the word for Alzheimer’s in a recent interview while explaining his family history with the disease. Trump mixed up Iceland and Greenland in his Davos speech last week, and one of his former lawyers, Ty Cobb, thinks that his “dementia and the cognitive decline are palpable, as do many experts, including many physicians.” It’s obvious that the president is getting worse every day.

Longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell has revealed that more than two dozen men received cushy plea deals with the government.

In a habeas petition filed Tuesday aimed at preemptively ending her prison sentence, Maxwell alleged that 29 friends of the notorious sex trafficker had been “protected” by the Justice Department by way of “secret settlements.”

Those settlements went to “25 men” and four potential “co-conspirators,” reported The Daily Beast. The petition has prompted questions regarding the identities of the cloaked individuals—and why the DOJ would offer them protection.

Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 19 to force the executive branch to release the files in their entirety. The bill stipulated that the Justice Department had 30 days to comply, but that deadline has since disappeared in the rearview. It is now late January, and less than one percent of the files has been made publicly available.

In a Tuesday court filing, the DOJ offered vague placations that it expects to process the trove, which includes two million documents, “in the near term.” Officials did not provide a specific date for the full release, as required by law.

Employees at the Justice Department are reportedly manually reviewing the pages to find and redact the names of victims and, presumably, censor mentions of protected individuals.

So far, the DOJ has released roughly 12,285 documents related to the Epstein files, totalling 125,575 pages.

Earlier this month, Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie called for a special master or independent counsel to hold the DOJ to a timeline as it drags its feet on the cache.

“The Department of Justice is openly defying the law by refusing to release the full Epstein files,” Khanna said in a statement. “Millions of files are being kept from the public.”

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in jail for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. Maxwell’s attorneys have pressed the White House for a pardon for several months now, though the White House has not indicated it will grant one.

A July interview between Maxwell and the DOJ proved incredibly fruitful for the convict, however, sparking concerns that the Trump administration had offered Maxwell a quid pro quo in exchange for a revised “Epstein list.”

Shortly after she spoke with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Maxwell—one of the worst sex criminals of the century—received an extremely cushy transfer, shipping her from a Florida prison to a low-security prison camp in Texas where she has been granted many privileges not typically afforded to inmates. Her time behind bars has since included meal service in her cell, unlimited toilet paper, and access to private visitations in a chaplain’s office outside standard visiting hours. Her requests to be separated from other inmates have also been granted, with tables and cellmates reportedly being relocated at her whim.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has suddenly changed his story on Alex Pretti’s killing after Donald Trump’s inner circle began to turn on him.

In a statement Tuesday, Miller conceded that Customs and Border Protection agents “may not have been following protocol” when they shot and killed Pretti.

Miller claimed that the White House had “provided clear guidance to DHS that the extra personnel that had been sent to Minnesota for force protection should be used for conducting fugitive operations to create a physical barrier between the arrest teams and the disruptors.”

“We are evaluating why the CBP team may not have been following that protocol,” he added.

To be sure, Miller’s statement didn’t meet the level of an apology or even a revelation, considering that any person who actually watched a video of the shooting could tell that it’s not protocol to fire 10 rounds at a disarmed man who was pinned to the ground.

But it’s a long way from Miller’s initial baseless claim that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” who’d attempted to murder federal law enforcement officers.

Miller’s callous response to federal agents killing an American citizen in broad daylight has not impressed his fellow Republicans. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Senator Thom Tillis took Miller to task for attacking Pretti “before he had even talked with anybody on the ground.”

“Stephen Miller never fails to live up to my expectations of incompetence,” Tillis said, adding that if he were president, Miller would already be out of Washington.

Speaking to the press Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not defend Miller’s “assassin” comment, and the ghoulish policy adviser was notably absent from a two-hour meeting Monday between Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The president’s social media addiction may have just cost him another court case.

In a post on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Donald Trump openly attempted to sway Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey into fulfilling his immigration agenda, a blatant violation of the Tenth Amendment.

“Surprisingly, Mayor Jacob Frey just stated that, ‘Minneapolis does not, and will not, enforce Federal Immigration Laws,’” Trump wrote. “This is after having had a very good conversation with him. Could somebody in his inner sanctum please explain that this statement is a very serious violation of the Law, and that he is PLAYING WITH FIRE!”

The problem for Trump’s bloviating is twofold. Not only is Minnesota—or any state, for that matter—not required to enforce federal law under the “anti-commandeering doctrine” of the Tenth Amendment, but his insistence that the North Star State do so effectively spells out that he’s attempting to strong-arm Minnesota into changing its local policies.

Legal reporters noted that detail alone could prove disastrous for Trump’s side in Minnesota’s federal lawsuit, which requests a temporary restraining order to end Operation Metro Surge. Officials have described ICE’s presence as an “unprecedented surge of DHS agents into the state.”

“Trump could not have designed a better statement to convince Judge Menendez that Operation Metro Surge is meant to coerce policy changes,” posted Politico’s Kyle Cheney. “And the menacing ‘playing with fire’ is exactly the kind of statement (‘retribution is coming’) that worked against the administration in court earlier this week.”

The Supreme Court has ruled several times that states cannot be forced to enact federal policy and that the federal government cannot sway state policy, setting national precedent in rulings such as Printz v. United States (1997) and New York v. United States (1992).

In just a few short weeks, Operation Metro Surge has conducted militarized raids across Minnesota, terrorizing residents while carrying out what state officials have described as “dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional stops and arrests, all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.”

The federal presence has also claimed the lives of two U.S. citizens. In the last month, agents with ICE and Customs and Border Protection shot and killed two U.S. citizens: Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti and award-winning poet Renee Nicole Good.

In 2025, the agency killed 32 people—its deadliest year in more than two decades.