WATCH: Reporter Asks Psaki ‘Why Not Invite Nicki Minaj to the White House’ — And Psaki Doesn’t Rule it Out
ABC News White House correspondent Karen Travers made a case for President Joe Biden’s administration to invite rap superstar Nicki Minaj to the White House. Press Secretary Jen Psaki did not shoot the idea down.
Despite a visible administration-wide diminution of patience with the unvaccinated — and a nationwide one as well — Psaki took care to keep it friendly when she was first asked about Ms. Minaj’s claim to have been invited to the People’s House to discuss her well-publicized hesitancy to get vaccinated for COVID-19, taking pains to point out that “we don’t see this as a point of tension or disagreement.”
Later in that same briefing, Travers pointed out that “Nicki Minaj has 22 million Twitter followers” and asked, “Why not invite her to the White House, have a conversation, and make it a big public thing?”
“Well, I appreciate your recommendations on our communications advice, Karen. You are quite experienced,” Psaki said, to laughter from the room.
Psaki then went into some more detail about the process of reaching out to influencers and others who might have questions or want to be of help — but did not rule a Minaj op:
Look, I will say, we recognize — and we’ve talked about this a bunch before — that we are not always the right platform or the right voice. Right? Sometimes that’s because people may not like the President and they may not have voted for him, and that’s okay. And we work with a range of partners to communicate the efficacy and the safety of the vaccine.
It’s also true that when we’re reaching a range of audiences — young people, where we’ve seen lower rates of vaccination, is a good example — we know there might be more effective voices. We don’t always know how effective working in partnership with celebrities may or may not be, but sometimes it is a tool that we can use or we’ve employed, as you’ve seen us do in — on cases before.
We do this behind the scenes quite a bit, sometimes to speak to particular audiences.
So, all I was conveying is it’s commonplace. We have calls every week, multiple times a week from our engagement team with a range of officials with followings to see how they might want questions answered, maybe they want to play a role in communicating information out publicly as a part of our effort to — to get the pandemic under control.
Q And do you have any sense — like, let’s just say Olivia Rodrigo. Do you have any sense of a difference that made? Are you guys able to track that in any way?
MS. PSAKI: It’s a good question. It’s kind of a hard thing to track. We can see how many views. We can see, anecdotally, if people say, “I got the vaccine because I saw this video.” And, certainly, sometimes that happens. I’m not sure. I’ll have to check.
So don’t be surprised if, after some reassurances from the White House Covid team, you see Nicki Minaj jump in the hoopty, hoopty, hoop and head to the White House to get those vaccination rates higher than a motherf*cker. Stranger things have happened.
Watch above via C-Span.
