Donald Trump made rapper Nicki Minaj the butt of a joke during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, just weeks after calling her “hot” at another event.
During Friday’s dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C. — rescheduled following April’s shooting incident that abruptly ended the initial gathering — Trump, 80, made a slew of jokes aimed at journalists including CNN’s Kaitlan Collins before turning his attention to Minaj.
The 43-year-old “Anaconda” singer has become one of the president’s most vocal allies in the music industry. Naturally, Trump used her as a punchline in a joke alluding to the gunman who attempted to storm the original April dinner.
“After hearing the gunshots, many people yelled, ‘Get down! Get down!’ which caused Nicki Minaj to start twerking,” he said. “Do you believe it? Get down. She’s the only one that really understood what that meant.”
The bizarre joke comes just weeks after Trump hosted Minaj for a lunch at the White House Rose Garden patio, giving her a sensual shout out during the event.
“We also have a woman that is so respected and so hot and so great and such a great friend of, I don’t say conservative, I say of common sense,” Trump said before going on a rant about Democratic Socialists and Communism.
Turning his focus back to Minaj, Trump added: “She’s a fantastic person and she’s a woman that’s respected by everybody, and she’s got real talent, Nicki Minaj. Nicki, stand up, please. Such a great person and respected by everybody,” the president added, according to The Daily Beast.
The rapper shared several photos and videos of her day at the White House, including ones of her posing in front of Trump’s “Presidential Walk of Fame,” and next to the image of an autopen Trump installed in place of a portrait of former President Joe Biden.
“Whoa!!!! #WhiteHouseBarbie with her favorite President of all time!!!” she wrote alongside a photo of her and Trump in the Oval Office.
Minaj previously visited the White House in January to promote Trump Accounts, the children’s investment accounts established by the current administration to help boost financial independence for American kids.
Trump also seemed to be enamored by the rapper then, and brought up her skin and nails unprompted during an address to mark Black History Month a month after she visited.
“I love Nicki Minaj. She was here a couple of weeks ago. She’s so beautiful. Her skin’s so beautiful,” he said in February, later obsessing over her nails, saying, “Her nails, her nails. They’re like that long.”
For her part, Minaj opened up about her support for Trump earlier this year, saying on The Katie Miller Podcast: “When I saw how he was being treated over and over and over, I just couldn’t handle it. I felt that…a lot of that bullying, and the smear campaigns and all of the lying, I felt that that had been done to me for so many years.
“And I was watching it in real time happen to someone else, and I didn’t think he deserved it.”
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