Your bag is empty.
When President Donald Trump finished delivering a closing message of fear and doom to Michigan Republicans on Sunday, another issue weighed on him ahead of next week’s midterm elections. Was it that the GOP could lose one or both chambers of Congress?
No, not that. The issue on his mind? Asses. Two of them, in particular.
The first derriere in question belonged to Ohio Sen. John Husted (R), who is running for reelection. The president claimed his previous comments on Husted’s physique – “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline. Studied him” – were taken out of context. “I’ve never done that with a man before,” Trump said on Sunday, acknowledging “off the record” that he did look at women’s behinds. He then let rallygoers in Port Huron, Mich., know about another rear end that was on his mind.
“I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj! That’s hard to miss!” he said of Minaj, a rapper who filmed herself traveling with Trump to the rally on Air Force One. “Stand up! That’s hard to miss.”
Once Minaj stood up and waved to a crowd that was applauding and whistling at her, the president said he hoped his public appreciation of her tuchus was OK.
“I hope Nicki wasn’t insulted, but we love Nicki,” he said. “She’s been with us for a long time.”
Later on, Minaj took to the stage to stump for Republicans and start a chant of, “We love Trump!” As she delivered a short speech, Reuters photographer Jonathan Ernst shot a photo of Trump appearing to look down and in the direction of Minaj’s backside. The photo has been viewed more than 4 million times on X as of Monday afternoon.
The comments are the latest in a series of recent remarks in which the president has praised the bodies and appearances of Republican candidates on the campaign trail.
In Ohio this month, he complimented Husted’s jawline and called Ed Gallrein, a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives, a “beautiful guy.” In Georgia, he described Rep. Mike Collins, the GOP’s nominee for the Senate, as “all man” compared to Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent seeking reelection. He’s also been quick to call out Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for the Senate who Trump said in September was not “the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen.” “But you know what he is?” He’s the greatest attorney general in America,” Trump concluded.
When it comes to Minaj, she’s long heard questions and comments about her butt, which she’s maintained doesn’t bother her.
“I don’t mind the questions, I don’t mind the fascination. It’s all good,” she said in a 2011 interview on MTV. “I’ve said this before, it doesn’t define me. So, I try my best not to focus my energy on it. If you guys focus energy on and spend energy on it, I don’t mind it. People are sitting in the barbershop talking about my butt, it’s conversational. That’s what people are gonna do.”
It’s also not the first time Trump has publicly lauded Minaj’s backside since she went from being a vocal critic to one of his most prominent celebrity supporters. At the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner in July, Trump joked about what the rapper was doing when a gunman had breached security and opened fire.
“After hearing the gunshots, many people yelled, ‘Get down!’ which caused Nicki Minaj to start twerking,” Trump said. “Can you believe it? She’s the only one that really understood what that meant.”
On social media, Minaj’s appearance with Trump on the campaign trail was predictably celebrated by the president’s supporters and ridiculed by critics.
“Nicki Minaj’s career trajectory has gone from selling over 100 million records to showing up in old hockey arena in the backwater town I grew up in so Trump can say ‘look at her ass,'” a Reddit commenter wrote.
Trump wasn’t the only member of the administration who had Minaj on the brain.
“I think we may have found the new White House Press Secretary,” Steven Cheung, the White House’s director of communications, wrote on X.
Maybe Katie Zacharia was just keeping the seat warm for Minaj?
