LOS ANGELES — Trevor Noah once again roamed through the audience during his monologue to open the Grammy Awards, taking pokes at the stars while standing right next to them, but he saved his most pointed jokes for absentees, and elicited an angry post from the president.

“Nicki Minaj is not here,” Noah said, to big cheers from the audience at Crypto.com Arena. “She is still at the White House with Donald Trump discussing very important issues.”

Minaj this week visited and praised the president, the culmination of a move toward MAGA that she's made in recent months.

Noah broke into a Trump impression. “Actually Nicki, I have the biggest (butt), everybody’s saying it Nicki.”

In his sixth time hosting the show — and what he says will be his last — Noah mostly played it safe during his monologue, not delving too much into much politics or controversy, at least during his monologue. There was no mention of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (on a night when many attendees were wearing “ICE OUT” buttons).

But Noah got more pointed later in the show, after Billie Eilish won song of the year.

“Wow. That is a Grammy that every artist wants,” Noah said, “almost as much as Trump wants Greenland. Which makes sense. I mean, because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new island to hang out with Bill Clinton.”

After the show in a Truth Social post, Trump reacted.

“Noah said, INCORRECTLY about me, that Donald Trump and Bill Clinton spent time on Epstein Island. WRONG!!! I can’t speak for Bill, but I have never been to Epstein Island, nor anywhere close, and until tonight’s false and defamatory, statement, have never been accused being there, not even by the Fake News Media,” the post said. “Noah, a total loser, better get his facts straight, and get them straight fast. It looks like I’ll be sending my lawyers to sue this poor, pathetic, talentless, dope of an M.C.”

After the crowd’s reaction to the joke during the show, Noah said, “Oh, I told you, it’s my last year. What are you going to do about it?”

At a different point in the show, Noah joked about the president’s penchant for suing TV networks when he said the Grammys were airing “completely live” because “if we edited any of the show, the president would sue CBS for $16 billion,” referring to Trump’s recent history with CBS News and a settlement he got from Paramount last summer.

It had seemed at first like he wasn't going to go very far into such material.

He said during the monologue Lauryn Hill was performing on the show for the first time since 1999.

“Do you understand how long ago that is?” he said. “Back in 1999, the president had had a sex scandal, people thought computers were about to destroy the world, and Diddy was arrested.”

Later in the show, Noah cozied up to the night's biggest nominee, Kendrick Lamar, and only congratulated him.

“I actually thought about writing a few jokes roasting you, but then I remembered what you can do to light-skinned dudes from other countries,” Noah, who is from South Africa, said in a reference to Lamar’s beef with the Canadian rapper Drake that culminated in last year’s big Grammy winner “Not Like Us.”

Later, he sat with Bad Bunny, and asked if he could come live with him in his native Puerto Rico if things got too bad in the U.S.

“Trevor, I have some news for you,” Bad Bunny said. “Puerto Rico is part of America.”

The Recording Academy announced less than three weeks ago that Noah was returning “one final time.”

“I believe in term limits,” Noah said during the show.

Only singer Andy Williams, who hosted the Grammys seven times in the 1970s, has hosted more often.

Noah himself is a four-time Grammy nominee, and was up this year in the best audio book recording category for “Into The Uncut Grass,” a children's story. He lost to the Dalai Lama.

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Kim Kardashian and Lewis Hamilton are sparking dating rumors after being seen together on multiple recent occasions.

On Monday, the “Kardashians” star and British F1 driver fueled romance rumors as they were spotted taking a private flight from the U.K. to Paris.

While both have remained silent about the nature of their relationship, TMZ obtained photos showing them boarding a flight together.

The pair was also photographed arriving at Kate Hudson’s New Year’s Eve bash in Aspen, but few paid attention at the time since they had been friends for years.

Hamilton was most recently linked to Sofia Vergara last year. He also previously dated Nicole Scherzinger on and off between 2007 and 2015. At the time, she described the breakup as “devastating.”

In 2015, the athlete was rumored to be dating Kardashian’s sister Kendall Jenner, but he quickly shut those rumors down.

“Me and Kendall have been friends for a while,” he told E! News. “We’re just friends.”

Meanwhile, the SKIMS founder has spoken openly about her thoughts on finding love, particularly since her divorce from Kanye West was finalized in 2022.

“You get really comfortable the longer you’re single,” she shared on an episode of The Kardashians. “You get really comfortable being single and the thought of you sharing a bed or your TV shows with someone else becomes less and less appealing because you get set in your ways.”

But that doesn’t mean the reality star has given up on dating. “I’m the biggest hopeless romantic,” she added. “When the right person comes along, I’ll be ready, and everything will be fine.”

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Rapper Snoop Dogg is supporting daughter Cori Broadus after the death of her baby mere weeks after coming home from a monthslong stint in the NICU.

Codi Dreaux, born three months preterm via emergency c-section last February, was 10 months old.

Broadus, 26, announced her loss on Saturday with a post in her Instagram Stories.

“Monday I lost the love of my life. My Codi,” she wrote accompanying a black-and-white photo of herself smiling down at the baby cradled in her arms. She punctuated the statement with an angel-wing emoji.

Her fiancé, Wayne Deuce, was equally devastated. The two had been overjoyed to announce Broadus’s pregnancy, their first child, in December 2024 and had been glued to her bedside during her hospital stay.

“I been the saddest since u left me Codi Dreaux,” Deuce captioned a father-daughter photo screenshot by People. “But I know u at peace. Daddy will always love you. My baby.”

A few hours after Broadus’s announcement, her rapper father, Snoop, whose given name is Calvin Broadus, publicly showed his support in an Instagram post of his own. The photo of himself, daughter Cori and sons Corde and Cordell, age 31 and 28, was captioned simply with a heart and a pair of praying hands. Codi was his eighth grandchild.

On Monday bereaved mom Broadus was still “waiting for someone to tell me to wake up and this is just a bad dream,” she wrote in a heartbreaking series of Instagram Story frames.

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From combined wire services