Win McNamee / Getty Images News via Getty Images
By
Nadia Santiago
At a July 6 White House luncheon promoting Trump’s accounts, President Trump praised Kelly Loeffler, a former Georgia senator who now heads the Small Business Administration. Atlanta News First reported that his remarks appeared to confuse Loeffler with rapper Nicki Minaj, who had promoted the show and attended the event. Praising Loeffler’s husband, Trump said: “But Jeff is great, and he’s married to someone who does a great job at the SBA. Small Business, Nicki Minaj.”
The Trump Accounts program creates government-sponsored investment accounts for children, money for later college, a first home, or starting a business. Nicki Minaj promoted it publicly, which is how the rapper’s name came up at a White House event on small businesses.
The event on 6 July 2026 was the Rose Garden lunch. Trump recognized Jeffrey Sprecher, founder and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. Sprecher is married to Kelly Loeffler, a former US senator from Georgia who now serves as Director of the Small Business Administration.
Atlanta News First reported that while praising Loeffler’s work at the SBA, Trump appeared to associate her with Minaj, calling the manager “Nicki Minaj” and “the Nicki of small business.” The outlet ran under the headline “Nicki, Kelly… close enough?” and said Trump “mistakenly identified Kelly Loeffler as Nicki Minaj while praising the SBA director’s work.”
The Hollywood Reporter focused on a different moment of the same event, when Trump introduced Minaj to the crowd and praised her as “very respected and hot and very beautiful.”
In the same words, Trump said that the SBA, “when you put it together, it’s the biggest bank of almost any in the world.” The SBA is a government agency, not a bank. It mainly guarantees loans from private lenders to small businesses, as well as disaster and counseling loans, and does not hold deposits. Its loan portfolio is measured in hundreds of billions. The world’s largest banks have billions, with JPMorgan Chase estimated at $4.4 trillion in assets and ICBC estimated at $7.65 trillion.
Sprecher runs the NYSE-owned exchange, Loeffler runs the SBA, and Minaj has been promoting a show that brought all three to the same event.
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