Trump Says Nicki Minaj Started Twerking When People Yelled “Get Down” at the Correspondents’ Dinner Shooting

Trump used his White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech Friday night to make a Nicki Minaj twerking joke about the shooting that shut the event down back in April. Speaking at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, he told the room that after the gunshots, people started yelling “get down, get down,” and that this caused Nicki Minaj to start twerking. He added that she was the only person in the building who really understood what the phrase meant.

Nicki was not in the building. She had been invited to the April 25 dinner at the Washington Hilton as a guest of Fox News, but she was running late and never made it inside before the gunman moved on the security checkpoint. Hours later she posted a clip of herself sitting in a car, captioned with an American flag emoji and a pair of prayer hands, and said nothing else about it.

The shooting she missed was not a scare. Law enforcement identified the suspect as 31 year old Cole Tomas Allen, a computer scientist from Torrance, California who took a one way train ticket across the country. Prosecutors say he rushed the checkpoint outside the ballroom armed and intending to kill. Guests went under their tables while agents pulled Trump and Melania Trump off the stage and cleared the room. Allen has pleaded not guilty to charges including attempted assassination and assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon, and he is in federal custody awaiting trial.

That is the backdrop the Nicki Minaj twerking line landed against, and the same program that carried the joke also carried the tribute. Secret Service Officer Victor Gonzales was honored for running toward the gunman, and the Washington Hilton staff were recognized for clearing guests out and then boxing up 2,000 meals that never got served so they could go to local shelters. WHCA president Weijia Jiang framed the rescheduled dinner as a refusal to let an act of violence have the final word. The association moved the event out of the Hilton entirely after 58 years there, landing at the Waldorf Astoria, a building that operated as the Trump International Hotel until 2021.

The Nicki bit was the opener, not the whole set. Trump started by needling the association over the awards being handed out that night, which included recognition for Wall Street Journal reporters behind the story of a birthday letter he allegedly wrote to Jeffrey Epstein. He said Paramount Skydance chief executive David Ellison had told him next year’s dinner would be renamed in his honor, and that he liked the sound of that. He worked in a third term reference, saying his second run has been better than the first and predicting the third would be better still. He brought up the UFC card he hosted on the South Lawn in June and used it to take a shot at Joe Biden over losing consciousness.

From there he moved to culture targets. He asked the room what happened to Bruce Springsteen, said Springsteen made four political speeches during a three hour concert, and joked that the tour should be renamed by swapping “Born” for “Bored.” He then went after Chris Christie for high fiving Springsteen in the aisle and getting left hanging. He credited Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with input on the menu and said Kennedy had pitched an appetizer built around “raccoon roadkill” that got shot down. He closed by saying he expects to be back in 2027, with the caveat that it depends on how nasty the press gets.

The Nicki Minaj twerking joke reads differently when you track how long these two have been circling each other. She first backed him publicly in November 2025 over his statements about Christians in Nigeria. In January she spoke at the Trump Accounts Summit and called herself his number one fan, and the photos of the two of them holding hands on that stage ran for days. She sat with Erika Kirk at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest and said she got tired of being pushed around. She posted AI generated images of the two of them for Presidents Day and got dragged for it. She skipped the Grammys, where Trevor Noah built a chunk of his monologue around the alliance, and she answered him on X. On July 6 Trump called her “so hot” from the podium at a Rose Garden lunch, which cost the internet another full week.

Nicki responded with a meme: