Rapper 50 Cent may not be attending the Republican National Convention after all—at least according to his reps, who told The Daily Beast that the rapper is “slated to be somewhere else.”
The comments come hours after CNN reported that the rapper may make an appearance in Milwaukee at some point. Instead, his reps say he will “be in Shreveport preparing for his upcoming Humor & Harmony festival,” set for the second week of August.
The rapper’s 2003 single “Many Men,” in which he describes his near death experience after being shot nine times before his rap career took off, has seen a surge in streaming since social media fans connected the lyrics with Trump’s bullet grazing ordeal at a campaign rally this past weekend in Pennsylvania.
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The lyrics, “Many men wish death upon me / Blood in my eye, dawg, and I can't see / I'm tryin' to be what I'm destined to be / And ni***as tryin' to take my life away,” were shared widely on Twitter/X following the released photos of Trump’s bloodied ear.
50 Cent, well-known for being very online, caught the references immediately. Since then he’s performed a show with Trump’s face photoshopped onto his own body in a parodied version of his Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ album cover, and also started selling t-shirts with the song’s name, per his Monday Instagram story.
Last month, the rapper said he could “see Black men identifying” with Trump in the upcoming election—a prediction he justified with the flimsy reasoning, “Because they got RICO charges.”
And yet, in 2019, 50 told The Daily Beast that Trump had offered him half a million dollars to attend Trump’s inauguration ceremony, but he’d declined: “Every dollar is not a good dollar,” he said.
He then supported Trump for president in 2020, but reversed course to support Biden amid backlash. He tweeted of Trump at the time, “I never liked him.”
