Final month, nation star Jelly Roll’s interplay with President-elect Donald Trump on the UFC 309 occasion held at Madison Sq. Backyard ignited a fervent dialog on social media, exacerbated by physique language evaluation.
Jelly Roll, whose actual identify is Jason Bradley DeFord, exhibited simple pleasure when assembly Trump, a response he selected to defend on this week’s episode of his spouse, 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 stated 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.”
The occasion, held 11 days after the election, was star-studded, full of a few of Trump’s most religious supporters, together with Elon Musk, Child 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 defined of social media video that confirmed 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.’”
Nonetheless, the lads did find yourself assembly.
“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 defined. “I go to shake his hand, I put my hand on his shoulder,” he recalled, remembering that he was nervous the Secret Service wouldn’t approve of the touching. “And he puts his hand on my shoulder.”
Jelly Roll stated Trump advised him that he cherished his emotional ballad, “Save Me,” launched in 2020 and that the nation singer was “doing incredible things.”
Talking extra to the backlash, Jelly Roll advised his spouse that assembly Trump was a no brainer. “There’s not a chance in hell I’m not going to meet the president-elect,” he stated. “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 stated.
“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 stated. “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.”
