Jelly Roll Calls Out Both Parties and Explains That Trump Handshake on Final Night as Kimmel Guest Host
Jelly Roll used his final night as guest host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! to tell politicians on both sides of the aisle they are doing an "absolute sh*t job" of bringing people together.
The country-rap artist and three-time Grammy winner spent the week of 30 August 2026 in the guest-host chair. His monologues drew backlash for jokes aimed at Donald Trump, and on his last night he addressed the criticism head-on — including a photograph that has followed him since November 2024.
That was when Jelly Roll shook Trump's hand at UFC 309 at Madison Square Garden. The image circulated widely and, for some viewers, sat uneasily alongside the anti-Trump material in his monologues. Jelly Roll framed the handshake as a matter of principle, not politics. He said he will always shake the hand of the sitting US president when asked, out of respect for his father — a USMC veteran who died in 2019. "A handshake is not an endorsement, a conversation is not an allegiance, and a joke is not a political point of view," he said, according to Deadline.
He was blunt about the jokes themselves. Nobody on the show was "forcing" him to make them, he said, pushing back at any suggestion that the material came from anyone but him (EW).
Jelly Roll's relationship with civic life is unusual for a public figure. He has several felony convictions and could not vote until March of 2026, when Tennessee Governor Bill Lee pardoned him and restored his voting rights. At the Grammy Awards in February 2026, he avoided discussing his politics entirely. Asked about his leanings during the Kimmel week, he said he tilts left on some issues but is "pretty down the middle" overall.
The speech carried a note of personal mission. Jelly Roll said he wants to be "a voice for the voiceless" because those are his people — a phrase that echoes his own path from incarceration to mainstream success.
What makes the moment land is the collision of everything at once: a first-time voter and pardoned felon guest-hosting network television, taking fire for jokes he says he chose freely, while explaining why he shook the hand of a president plenty of his audience cannot stand. He did not ask anyone to agree with him. He asked them to separate a gesture from an allegiance, and a punchline from a platform.
Whether that distinction holds for viewers is another matter. Jelly Roll made his case and closed out his week behind the desk.
