Jelly Roll is due to perform at the Invictus Games in Whistler/Vancouver in February. Jelly Roll’s inclusion in the musical line-up was announced last month via a cute Invictus video with Prince Harry. Jelly Roll came into a tattoo parlor and “tattooed” Harry’s neck. Good times. While Jelly Roll was certainly well known before that Invictus video, there was a new kind of focus on him because he was now associated with Harry. Suddenly, people had a lot of feelings about Jelly Roll’s politics, even though the man is a felon who cannot vote. In November, there was also a video of Jelly Roll greeting Donald Trump with a sh-t-eating grin on his face and obviously, people believed Jelly Roll was and is MAGA-coded. Well, he made a new statement about his politics:
Jelly Roll is responding to criticism for meeting the President-elect Donald Trump. While appearing on his wife Bunnie Xo’s podcast Dumb Blonde for the Dec. 16 episode, the “Halfway to Hell” singer spoke about meeting with Trump, 78 during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden in New York on Nov. 16.
“Dude, there’s not a chance in hell that I’m not going to meet the president-elect. I don’t care,” Jelly, 40, said, noting how he would be excited to meet any president.
“If I got a call to meet Joe Biden, I would have stopped at any point and [met] him,” the singer added. “That’s the active president. I don’t care about what he thinks or I think about policies.”
“I don’t hide behind the ‘I’m not political stuff.’ I’m not political! People who actually know me know I’m also one of the old-school dudes,” he continued. “I like to talk about things I’m passionate about. With that, I like to know about it. I don’t know enough about politics to act like I know anything that’s going on or what anybody’s standing for policy-wise.”
The “Son of a Sinner” singer added that he didn’t grow up in a “voting culture” at home where his parents “pushed” him to vote. “They did push respecting the president though,” he said, adding that he thinks the position is “the hardest job in the world.”
“Meeting President Trump was cool. Ultimately, I don’t really care [about] any blowback I get about it,” Jelly concluded. “The truth is: It was really cool to meet the president.”
Bunnie, 44, agreed. “Anybody who gets the opportunity to meet a president, a vice president… anything like that. It’s a f—ing honor.”
I sort of believe that Jelly Roll is the kind of person who thinks Donald Trump is “cool,” but I also buy that JR simply has respect for the office of presidency, so he would be jazzed to meet the president, ex-president, vice president, etc, regardless of political party. As he says, if President Biden had asked him to perform at the White House, or asked for a photo-op, JR would have happily done that because that’s the president. I’ve actually met a lot of people like this, who don’t consider themselves political at all and swear that they don’t care about political parties. It’s usually white people and yeah, they usually vote Republican.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, screencaps from Invictus video.
