Last month, country star Jelly Roll's interaction with President-elect Donald Trump at the UFC 309 event held at Madison Square Garden ignited a fervent conversation on social media, exacerbated by body language analysis.
Jelly Roll, whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord, exhibited undeniable excitement when meeting Trump, a reaction he chose to defend on this week's episode of his wife, Bunnie XO's podcast, "Dumb Blonde."
"I don't care who you were, if you were in that building, the hair on your skin stood up," he said of Trump's grand entrance in MSG. "And you looked, and all you're watching is the president-elect, who got elected like, 8 days ago, walking in, with his entire cabinet with him - almost. You know what I mean? And his kids and his grandchildren. And it was powerful, dude. Like I don't care what side of the aisle you're on."
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The event, held 11 days after the election, was star-studded, filled with some of Trump's most devout supporters, including Elon Musk, Kid Rock, and UFC founder and CEO Dana White.
"Everybody's like, ‘You look really - you got a goofy smile on your face.’ I'm like, 'Y'all couldn't feel what we were feeling," he explained of social media video that showed him eagerly watching Trump's processional. "Like that room was palpitating. And when Trump walks right by me, I'm like ‘He don’t know who I am.' So right then I was like, ‘Well. Damn. I’m not gonna get to meet the president. I was kinda sad.'"
However, the men did end up meeting.
"I kind of look over and [Trump] makes eye contact. And what you don't see in the video was, he gives me the Trump point," Jelly Roll explained. "I go to shake his hand, I put my hand on his shoulder," he recalled, remembering that he was worried the Secret Service wouldn't approve of the touching. "And he puts his hand on my shoulder."
Jelly Roll said Trump told him that he loved his emotional ballad, "Save Me," released in 2020 and that the country singer was "doing incredible things."
Speaking more to the backlash, Jelly Roll told his wife that meeting Trump was a no-brainer. "There’s not a chance in hell I’m not going to meet the president-elect," he said. "I don’t care…if I would have got a call to go meet Joe Biden at any point, I would have stopped what I was doing to go meet him. That’s the active president. I wouldn’t have cared what people thought…what I even think about his policies," he admitted.
"I don’t hide behind the ‘I’m not political’ stuff — I’m not political!… I like to talk about things I'm passionate about. With that, I like to know about 'em. I don’t know enough about politics to act like I know anything that’s going on, what anybody’s standing for policy-wise. I genuinely don’t know," he said.
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"I didn't grow up in a voting culture. My father didn't push voting on me. My mother didn't push voting on me," the Tennessee-raised singer said. "They did push, ‘respect our president’ on me, though," he added. "That's the hardest job in the world. Respect whoever has it, you know?"
"When I look back at my relationship with politics - like, we didn't watch election night. I don't have one memory of us as a family really giving a s--- who's getting elected. So I've just always carried that."
