Although rotating blades are designed to operate diverging from structural frequencies, internal resonance also occurs under certain rotation speeds that greatly affect the stiffness of the blades. Therefore, a detailed investigation of the resonance mechanisms of rotating blades, especially those introduced by nonlinearities, is of great importance in structural design and optimization. A dynamic model of a functionally graded graphene/titanium alloy composite trapezoid plate is established to investigate the nonlinear dynamics of a rotating blade with varying cross-sections. The ordinary differential equations of the plate are established based on the energy method and Lagrange equations. The occurrence of one to three internal resonance for the trapezoid plate is identified through the analysis of linear and nonlinear free vibrations. Then, the steady-state responses of the rotating plate in the case of 1:3 internal resonance are numerically calculated and verified by the approximation solution of the method of multiple scales. Parametric studies are conducted to investigate the effects of the rotation speed, taper ratio, excitation amplitude and excitation frequency on the amplitude‒frequency and amplitude‒force curves.