Nicki Minaj has never been the sort of celebrity who clears her throat and asks permission. She talks like a firework: bright, loud, and just unpredictable enough that you lean in. So when she was asked about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on The Katie Miller Podcast, it was never going to be a careful little non-answer wrapped in PR gauze. It was going to be a line. And she delivered one that sounded like a punchline and a scolding all at once.
“Well… I think he should go home. Like E.T., he should go home. Go phone home and then go home,” Nicki Minaj said—invoking the famous “phone home” moment from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and turning it into a blunt instruction for a duke who has made exile into a franchise.
The joke lands because it’s ridiculous. It also lands because it’s mean in a very specific, very American way: the kind of meanness that pretends it’s just common sense.
Nicki Minaj on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle:
“I think he should go home” 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/CPojPpSv0H
— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) February 3, 2026
Nicki Minaj didn’t frame her take as hatred. In the same breath as the jab, she insisted she had “nothing but love” for the Sussexes, and she even toyed with a mock-British accent—“That’s just me, darling”—as if the theatricality might cushion the impact. But it’s hard to miss what she’s really arguing: that Prince Harry crossed a line when he made private family pain into public material.
“I don’t think he should’ve aired the family’s dirty laundry, but that’s just me,” Nicki Minaj said, summarizing a complaint that has followed Prince Harry since he and Meghan Markle stepped back from royal duties, then described their experience in interviews and in his memoir Spare. Her wording is almost quaint—”dirty laundry”—as if the royal drama were a domestic squabble, not a multi-year collision of race, tabloids, family hierarchy, and institutional power.
Then she gave away the emotional engine behind her frustration: “I… love the Royal Family as if I know them,” she said, admitting she’s attached to the idea of monarchy the way Americans often are—through myth, pageantry, and a heavily edited fantasy.
That’s the paradox, right there. People who don’t want a king still want the royal story to behave. And when it doesn’t—when it gets angry, complicated, and undeniably human—some of those same viewers recoil, as if reality has broken the spell.
And they acted shocked when he was asked about the possibility of returning someday as a “ working royal”. He did not stutter. Especially now we know how they protect child abusers.
Harry was never going to put his family at risk, he knew the royal family too well. pic.twitter.com/JiQannd85g
— Claire (@claireXanda) February 4, 2026
There’s also a practical problem baked into Nicki Minaj’s breezy “go home” advice: Prince Harry has repeatedly argued that returning to the U.K. isn’t simply a matter of booking a flight. His legal fight over security has been framed, in court and in reporting, around the claim that he “does not feel safe” bringing Meghan and their children, Archie and Lilibet, to Britain without police protection.
If you want the Sussex saga stripped of melodrama, start there. Security isn’t romantic. It’s assessments and protocols, the unglamorous math of risk. But it’s the one part of the story that keeps reappearing because it governs what’s even possible: whether Prince Harry can show up, whether Meghan will, and under what terms.
And the calendar doesn’t stop just because the family drama is unresolved. The Invictus Games Foundation has confirmed that the Invictus Games Birmingham 2027 will run July 10–17, 2027, putting a giant red circle around the question of whether the Sussexes will appear in the U.K. again—and how.
Prince Harry is set to testify in his lawsuit against Associated Newspapers Limited, the publishers of the Daily Mail.https://t.co/8Fw4gBcm7O pic.twitter.com/0gbdwcGBVV
— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) January 18, 2026
Nicki Minaj’s “E.T.” line compresses all of that into a neat fantasy: stop talking, stop fighting, stop embarrassing everyone, and just return to the original set. It’s a tidy thought, built for a podcast clip and a thousand reposts.
But “go home” in 2026 isn’t always advice. Sometimes it’s a verdict. And in Prince Harry’s case, it’s also a demand to make peace with a place that—by his account—can’t or won’t guarantee the safety he says his family needs.
