Jelly Roll, seen at a June performance in Nashville, told Trump fans to stop listening to him … and they apparently complied. The singer’s social media accounts have reportedly seen former fans unfollowing in droves. (Jason Kempin / Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders September 2, 2026 at 2:54pm
Jelly Roll can’t say he didn’t ask for it.
After the rotund, country-rooted rapper drew fire from fans for using his guest-starring stint on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” for consecutive nights of bashing President Donald Trump with all the sneering condescension of the modern left, he responded to critics by essentially telling them to stop listening to him.
He might not have been expecting too many to take his advice.
In a podcast Monday and a post on the social media platform X, conservative social media personality Johnson reported that he’d run the numbers on Jelly Roll’s social media accounts and found that “hundreds of thousands” of the entertainer’s followers had abandoned him.
PANIC: Jelly Roll Loses Hundreds of Thousands of Followers After Betraying Fans. Public BREAKDOWN…
Jelly Roll told his Trump-supporting country music fans to stop listening to him after he spent the week trashing Trump on Jimmy Kimmel…Well, his fans listened.
He’s lost… pic.twitter.com/wrTJzbTbU4
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 30, 2026
With the aid of a request to the artificial intelligence engine Grok, and using social media tracking websites, Johnson found that Jelly Roll’s followers had plummeted after his Kimmel guest-hosting spots.
Do you follow Jelly Roll on social media?
Figures for TikTok were unavailable, Johnson said, but the number of followers lost for Jelly Roll on Instagram, Facebook, and X was considerably more than 100,000. And that isn’t the last of it.
“You have to assume there’s going to be attrition in other platforms,” Johnson said. “It’s hundreds of thousands … of subscribers.”
What’s interesting about this is how predictable it all was.
As Johnson pointed out, country music isn’t “exactly Republican-coded” or “MAGA coded” it is “culturally coded for America first.”
“And that’s just a matter of absolute fact.”
Jimmy Kimmel’s core audience, on the other hand, may be many and varied in its political opinions, ranging from high-school sophomore-level liberalism to college-level progressivism to post-graduate communism (and all leftist points in between), but one thing that can be said with certainty is that it’s not “culturally coded for America first.”
And whatever creed that audience has in common at this point can almost certainly be boiled down to the hatred of Donald Trump that Kimmel has made his calling card.
So Jelly Roll decided to play to that hatred, and he got his yuks on a national stage that most of the nation ignores completely.
And when he faced criticism for it, he told the critics to stop listening.
As the numbers Johnson reported show, many likely former fans decided to take him up on it — in droves.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. When you alienate the exact core audience that built your country music career just to score cheap points on late-night TV, this is the inevitable result.
— CPT. chesterbpolkman (@chesterbpolkman) August 31, 2026
So, Jelly Roll — and no doubt his management team — had to expect a backlash of some kind.
But hemorrhaging social media support like this is going from “backlash” to “backfire.” And a backfire like that can be very bad for an entertainer’s career.
No one — including Jelly Roll himself — can say he didn’t ask for it.
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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
