Headline

Nicki Minaj Campaigned for Mike Rogers at a Michigan Rally Where Trump Called His Opponent a “Jihadist”

Brief

On October 25, 2026, rapper Nicki Minaj appeared on stage with President Trump at a Port Huron, Michigan rally for U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers and gubernatorial candidate John James. She led the crowd in chants of “We love Trump,” urged Michigan voters to back the two Republicans, criticized gender-affirming care for transgender minors, and told Trump she would “support him forever and ever.” Separately in the same roughly two-hour speech, Trump called Rogers’ Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed — who is Muslim and would be the first Muslim U.S. senator if elected — a “jihadist” and a “Muslim Brotherhood member,” said El-Sayed wants to impose “Sharia law,” and said he should have to pass through a metal detector before entering the Senate. El-Sayed has denied any Muslim Brotherhood ties, and Al Jazeera, the Washington Post and Michigan Advance each reported the remarks as part of a monthslong pattern of anti-Muslim attacks on his candidacy. Every factual claim Trump made about El-Sayed is false or has no supporting evidence: Bridge Michigan, PolitiFact and Michigan Public have each found no tie between El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed has disavowed the group on camera, and PolitiFact rated the claim that he calls for Sharia law in America “Pants on Fire.” News coverage of the event does not show Minaj commenting on, echoing, or responding to Trump’s statements about El-Sayed.

Why It Matters

Michigan’s Senate and governor’s races are among the most closely watched of the 2026 midterms, and this rally drew national coverage largely for an unrelated moment — Trump’s on-stage remarks about Minaj’s body. That coverage risked burying the substance of what each speaker actually said on stage, at the same event, to the same crowd. Separating the two records — Minaj’s own words from Trump’s — matters because conflating them (treating her presence as agreement with everything said that day) would misstate what the public record actually shows.

The Facts

What Minaj said

• Minaj traveled with Trump to Michigan aboard Air Force One, landing at Selfridge Air National Guard Base ahead of the rally. (USA Today, Oct. 25, 2026)
• On stage, she opened by leading the crowd in chanting “We love Trump.” (USA Today, Oct. 25, 2026)
• She told the crowd: “Since he’s come back, he’s changed the energy of our country. He’s given us a future to look forward to.” (mlive.com, Oct. 25, 2026)
• She urged Michigan voters to back Rogers for Senate and James for governor, at points leading chants of their names, and said: “Michigan, God bless you. We really need all these great people to be elected.” (mlive.com, Oct. 25, 2026)
• She criticized gender-affirming care for transgender minors: “We don’t want our children to be bombarded with sex changes, right? … We want people to leave the children alone, leave them out of it.” (USA Today, Oct. 25, 2026)
• She closed: “President Trump, it is an honor to stand with you every single time, and I will continue to support you forever and ever. If you run again, I will support you again.” (USA Today, Oct. 25, 2026)
• This was not her first joint appearance with Trump in his second term; USA Today reported she has also appeared with him at a Treasury Department “Trump Accounts” summit and a White House Rose Garden luncheon, and that she was previously critical of his first-term immigration policies before aligning with him and the Republican Party during his second term.

What Trump said, at the same event, about his opponent

• Throughout the roughly two-hour speech, Trump repeatedly called El-Sayed a “jihadist” and, at one point, “a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member,” according to multiple outlets. (Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Michigan Advance, Oct. 25, 2026)
• He said: “So Abdul … also wants our country to go to Sharia law, and if he ever pulls that off, he should be the first one that’s tried. I’ll be a witness.” (Al Jazeera, Oct. 26, 2026)
• He said El-Sayed “would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate,” adding, “I want him to have a metal detector.” (Al Jazeera, Oct. 26, 2026)
• He told the crowd that if El-Sayed and Democrats win, “they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.” (Al Jazeera, Oct. 26, 2026)
• He told Jewish voters that “any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves” and said anyone “with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane.” (Michigan Advance, Oct. 25, 2026)
• Al Jazeera reported this was an escalation of anti-Muslim rhetoric Trump had used against El-Sayed “in recent weeks,” including misstating his name as “Mohammed”; Michigan Advance reported Rogers himself had separately emphasized El-Sayed’s full Arabic name and alleged Muslim Brotherhood ties without documented evidence, which Michigan Public (NPR) fact-checked and found did not match the evidence regarding El-Sayed’s family.
• El-Sayed, a U.S.-born citizen and former public health official, has denied any membership in or ties to the Muslim Brotherhood; Al Jazeera reported there is no evidence he was ever a member of the group or any foreign organization.

What the record does not show

• No outlet reviewed for this backgrounder reports Minaj commenting on, referencing, or reacting to Trump’s statements about El-Sayed, Islam, or the Muslim Brotherhood, either during or after the rally.
• Coverage describes her on stage separately from that portion of Trump’s remarks; the “jihadist” and “Sharia law” lines are not reported as occurring during her segment, and she is not quoted or paraphrased addressing El-Sayed, his faith, or his candidacy at all.

Fact Check: Trump’s Claims About El-Sayed

Every statement checked in this section is Trump’s, made from his own podium. Minaj did not make, repeat or respond to any of them, and nothing here describes her speech.

“A jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member” — false

• No evidence ties El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. Bridge Michigan reviewed the claims Republicans cite and found “no evidence that El-Sayed has ties to the organization or pledged support.” (Bridge Michigan, Sept. 3, 2026) Al Jazeera reported there is no evidence he was ever a member of the group or any foreign organization. (Al Jazeera, Oct. 26, 2026)
• The material offered as proof does not show a link. Rogers and his allies point to a 2011 HuffPost column in which El-Sayed, then a Columbia University epidemiologist, urged the Obama administration to back Egypt’s pro-democracy protesters, and to a 2012 statement he signed with 45 other Egyptian-Americans defending Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s elected, Brotherhood-backed president. PolitiFact and Bridge Michigan both found that neither was a pledge of support for the Brotherhood. The U.S. terrorist designations of Brotherhood chapters came in late 2025 and 2026, years after both documents. (PolitiFact, Oct. 19, 2026; Bridge Michigan, Sept. 3, 2026)
• The family claims rest on social media posts from 2012 and 2013 by El-Sayed’s half-sister about their mother’s family in Egypt. His parents divorced when he was 3, and he was raised mainly by his father and stepmother in Michigan. Michigan Public found that Rogers’ separate claim that El-Sayed’s birth mother funneled charity money to terrorist groups does not match the evidence: she does not appear in any indictment in that case. El-Sayed called the posts “hearsay evidence from a tweet.” (Michigan Public, Oct. 24, 2026; PolitiFact, Oct. 19, 2026)
• He has disavowed the group on camera. At an Oct. 17 town hall in Caro, asked whether he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, he answered: “Sure, yeah, absolutely.” PolitiFact rated Rogers’ claim that he “didn’t disavow” it False. (PolitiFact, Oct. 19, 2026)
• No outlet reviewed for this backgrounder reports any act, threat or statement by El-Sayed that advocates violence, so the word “jihadist” has no factual basis. His own reply to it: “if there’s any jihad, it’s going to be the one against medical debt.” (Bridge Michigan, Sept. 3, 2026, quoting his MSNOW interview)

“Wants our country to go to Sharia law” — false

• PolitiFact rated “Pants on Fire” the claim, spread on social media in August, that El-Sayed “openly calls for Sharia law in America.” The claim comes from clipped excerpts of a 2022 speech to the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In that speech El-Sayed mentioned Oklahoma’s 2010 ballot ban on Sharia, which a federal court struck down in 2013, while recounting Oklahoma’s history, from the Trail of Tears to the 1921 Tulsa massacre and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The theme of the speech was unity, and he called for nothing like Sharia in American law. (PolitiFact, Aug. 10, 2026)
• El-Sayed has said he believes in the separation of church and state and wants to protect “the kind of America where everybody can pray how they choose to pray, or choose not to pray at all.” (Religion News Service, 2025, quoted by PolitiFact, Aug. 10, 2026) At the Caro town hall he objected that the Brotherhood question implied “because I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution.” (PolitiFact, Oct. 19, 2026)
• Trump went further than the claim itself: “he should be the first one that’s tried. I’ll be a witness.” That calls for a candidate for federal office to be put on trial for a position he does not hold.

The metal detector and the airplane — no basis

• Trump said El-Sayed “would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector,” and that anyone “with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane.” (Al Jazeera, Oct. 26, 2026; The Washington Sun, Oct. 25, 2026)
• No such record exists. No outlet reviewed for this backgrounder reports any law-enforcement allegation, investigation or watchlisting involving El-Sayed, a U.S.-born former public health official. The Washington Sun reported that Trump and his allies “have repeatedly linked El-Sayed, without any evidence, to radical militant Islamic ideology.” (The Washington Sun, Oct. 25, 2026)

“Open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists … until you cannot even have a Christmas” — fear appeal, contradicted by his platform

• El-Sayed’s stated immigration position, in the candidates’ televised debate: “We’ve got to keep the border secure, all of our borders secure.” He would replace ICE with an agency modeled on the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and create “a clear pathway to citizenship.” (Michigan U.S. Senate debate, Rev transcript) Abolishing ICE is a real and contested position, and he holds it. (Britannica) Nothing in his platform or record proposes admitting “jihadists.”
• The Christmas line makes no factual claim at all. It presents a Muslim senator as a threat to a Christian holiday.
• Even with a Democratic Senate majority, immigration law cannot change without the president’s signature. Trump’s term runs to January 2029.

“Any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves” — an opinion that omits the record

• The statement is a judgment about voters, not a factual claim about El-Sayed, but the dispute behind it is real. El-Sayed has called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide” and said he would end U.S. military aid to Israel. (Britannica) He apologized for saying “hurt people hurt people” about an attack this year on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, and some Jewish Democrats remain skeptical of him. (Jewish Insider, Oct. 2026)
• He has also pledged to protect Jewish people from antisemitism, saying his commitment to Jewish safety is “the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.” (Reuters, Oct. 24, 2026)

“Mohammed” — a deliberate misnaming

• Before the rally, Trump had taken to calling El-Sayed “Mohammed El-Sayed.” When El-Sayed replied that the president knows his name is Abdul, Trump told a Kentucky rally: “I’m the president of the United States, I can call you whatever the hell I want.” (Bridge Michigan, Oct. 19, 2026; Al Jazeera, Oct. 26, 2026)

The pattern

• Not one of the attacks cites a vote, policy or action of El-Sayed’s. Each rests on his religion, his family or his name.
• Trump has made this argument before. In 2015 he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and in 2017 he signed the travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. (Al Jazeera, Oct. 26, 2026)
• El-Sayed faced the same Brotherhood claim when he ran for governor in 2018, and Republican candidate Patrick Colbeck drew bipartisan condemnation for making it. Michigan Republican Party Chairman Jim Runestad has said the Rogers campaign asked the party not to refer to El-Sayed by his full name, and that “him being Muslim or being Arab or any of that — that’s irrelevant to me.” (Bridge Michigan, Sept. 3, 2026)
• The rhetoric reaches beyond the race. CAIR-Michigan told Bridge Michigan that Islamic groups and religious leaders in the state have seen a significant increase in harassment and threats of violence since El-Sayed’s nomination. (Bridge Michigan, Sept. 3, 2026)

The Counterfactual

Had Minaj herself invoked El-Sayed’s faith, repeated Trump’s “jihadist” characterization, or otherwise commented on the remarks, that would be her own documented speech and would belong in any record of her political activity. Based on the sourcing gathered here, that did not happen. A separate, open question the available coverage does not resolve: whether Minaj was present in the room, or had left the stage area, at the specific points when Trump made the “jihadist” and “Sharia law” remarks — none of the five sources on her appearance state this either way, and the two sources covering Trump’s remarks in detail do not describe her reaction or presence at that moment.

Evidence Trail

1. Nicki Minaj joins Trump in Port Huron, urges Michigan voters to back Republicans — mlive.com, Oct. 25, 2026. https://www.mlive.com/politics/2026/10/nicki-minaj-joins-trump-in-port-huron-urges-michigan-voters-to-back-republicans.html
2. Trump compliments Nicki Minaj’s ‘beautiful’ butt in rally speech — USA Today, Oct. 25, 2026. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2026/10/25/trump-praises-nicki-minaj-butt-michigan-rally/92436573007
3. Trump focuses on Nicki Minaj’s ‘beautiful’ rear, AOC and owning Greenland in marathon rally speech — The Independent, Oct. 25, 2026. https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-michigan-rally-nicki-minaj-aoc-greenland-b3073110.html
4. Rap phenom Nicki Minaj to rally alongside Trump in metro Detroit Sunday — Washington Examiner, Oct. 25, 2026. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/4778886/nicki-minaj-to-rally-alongside-trump-metro-detroit-sunday
5. Trump dials up Islamophobia at Michigan Senate rally against Abdul El-Sayed — Al Jazeera, Oct. 26, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/26/trump-dials-up-islamophobia-at-michigan-senate-rally-against-abdul-el-sayed
6. Trump calls El-Sayed a ‘jihadist’ as he escalates campaign rhetoric — Washington Post, Oct. 25, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/25/trump-escalates-campaign-rhetoric-calling-el-sayed-jihadist
7. Trump invokes anti-Muslim rhetoric to attack El-Sayed at Michigan rally supporting Rogers, James — Michigan Advance, Oct. 25, 2026. https://michiganadvance.com/2026/10/25/trump-invokes-anti-muslim-rhetoric-to-attack-el-sayed-at-michigan-rally-supporting-rogers-james
8. Trump Attacks El-Sayed As a ‘Jihadist’ in Anti-Muslim Screeds — The Washington Sun, Oct. 25, 2026. https://www.notus.org/whitehouse/trump-el-sayed-michigan-calls-jihadist-metal-detector
9. Fact check: No evidence Abdul El-Sayed ‘pledged support’ to Muslim Brotherhood — Bridge Michigan (Lauren Gibbons), Sept. 3, 2026. https://bridgemi.com/michigan-government/fact-check-no-evidence-abdul-el-sayed-pledged-support-to-muslim-brotherhood
10. Abdul El-Sayed disavows Muslim Brotherhood, responds to claims — Bridge Michigan (Lauren Gibbons), Oct. 19, 2026. https://bridgemi.com/michigan-government/abdul-el-sayed-disavows-muslim-brotherhood-responds-to-claims
11. Mike Rogers said Abdul El-Sayed didn’t disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. Video shows he did — PolitiFact (Caleb McCullough), Oct. 19, 2026. https://politifact.com/factchecks/2026/oct/19/mike-rogers/el-sayed-muslim-brotherhood-michigan-senate
12. Republicans attacking Abdul El-Sayed say he supports Shariah in the US. That distorts an old video. — PolitiFact, Aug. 10, 2026. https://politifact.com/factchecks/2026/aug/10/tweets/abdul-el-sayed-sharia-muslim-cair-michigan-senate
13. Fact check: Rogers’ claims about El-Sayed’s mother don’t match the evidence — Michigan Public, Oct. 24, 2026. https://www.michiganpublic.org/politics-government/2026-10-24/fact-check-rogers-claims-about-el-sayeds-mother-dont-match-the-evidence
14. Michigan Senate Debate: Abdul El-Sayed, Mike Rogers — Rev transcript. https://www.rev.com/transcripts/michigan-senate-debate
15. Abdul El-Sayed — Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abdul-El-Sayed
16. Divided over Israel, Detroit Democrats unite on rising costs for midterm elections — Reuters, Oct. 24, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/divided-over-israel-detroit-democrats-unite-rising-costs-midterm-elections-2026-10-24
17. El-Sayed letter to Jewish community on antisemitism fails to reassure skeptics — Jewish Insider, Oct. 2026. https://jewishinsider.com/2026/10/michigan-democratic-senate-nominee-abdul-el-sayed-jewish-democrats-antisemitism

AI-assisted disclosure: This backgrounder was drafted with AI assistance (web research and first-draft composition) from the cited sources, under human editorial review before publication.

Protected speech note: This document is a descriptive backgrounder, not an accountability profile, and makes no claim that Nicki Minaj — a private citizen and entertainer — bears responsibility for statements made by another speaker at an event she attended. Her own quoted statements are reported as her speech; Trump’s quoted statements are reported as his. No inference of endorsement is drawn beyond what each speaker is reported, on the record, to have said.