Country singer Jelly Roll answers for the Trump jokes he told hosting Kimmel

Jelly Roll took the Jimmy Kimmel Live! chair for the week of August 24 and did something country singers generally do not: he made jokes about a sitting president on three separate nights and then refused to walk them back. By the Thursday finale he had spent roughly ten minutes on Donald Trump, and the reaction had grown large enough that he devoted his closing monologue to explaining himself.

The material itself was not subtle. Talking about the Freedom 250 event in Washington, he said the president seemed to enjoy the Indy Car race, which was a switch because normally he only likes his own race. He returned the next night to the subject of the president's weight, noting that he has personally lost an entire Donald Trump, a line built on his own well-documented weight loss, before adding that based on approval ratings most of the country would like to do the same.

What makes this unusual is not the jokes but the absence of the apology that traditionally follows them in Nashville. A country singer needling a politician is normally a single quip delivered with a wink. This was several jokes, across several topics, over three nights, with clips of the president's own speeches played behind them.

On the final night he addressed the speculation head on. "It is funny that before this week everybody thought I was MAGA," he said, adding that people now think he is a liberal snowflake. He then placed himself: he leans left on some things, sits pretty down the middle on most, and is a Christian, a country singer, a farmer and a bow hunter.

The monologue also settled something he had left hanging since February. At the Grammy Awards, where he won three, he was asked about his politics and declined, promising to speak within the week. He never did. He said he does not regret asking for time, but wishes he had found the words sooner, and that by trying so hard not to make a political statement he became one. He said he had spent his career avoiding a party in part because until March of this year he was not allowed to vote, and that he plans to use that right in November.

He did not name a party. He said instead that he tries to speak for the unspoken for, and that at the Grammys he had a microphone and did not use it properly. He also said he will always shake the hand of a US president because his father was a veteran, and that a handshake is not an endorsement, a conversation is not an allegiance, and a joke is not a political point of view.

The week landed at a strange point in his own calendar. It was his most public stretch since his divorce from Bunnie Xo, and it came shortly after he said he was planning a year or two away from the road. He closed the monologue with a story about his father, a lifelong Democrat, and his uncle, a Republican, who he said were best friends because they agreed on hundreds of things and disagreed on a few. His conclusion was that politicians and algorithms profit from convincing people their neighbour is the problem.

He is not the only musician who spent the year arguing about the president in public. Iron Maiden opened a North American run with a dig at Trump, and Taylor Swift pulled her music from Trump campaign videos. What separates Jelly Roll's week is the format: four nights of network television, where the joke always lands before the explanation.

Whether any of this costs him anything on country radio is the open question. He would not be the first artist in the format to find out that the audience is less monolithic than the industry assumes, and he would not be the first to find out the opposite either.