In a blistering Instagram post following Bad Bunnyʼs history‑making, ICE‑shredding Super Bowl halftime show, Charley Crockett took a flamethrower to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the entire MAGA‑country aesthetic that’s spent the last week frothing about the Puerto Rican popstar that’s taken the world by storm. Country music has had a rough go of it as of late, considering nearly every artist performing at Turning Point USA’s god-awful “All-American Halftime Show” was a proud representative of the “genre,” but at least we’ve got one good cowboy in Crockett. “They keep saying I’m a cosplay cowboy but they love a cosplay president,” the Grammy-winning country singer wrote, pointing out that some of the same folks smearing Muhammad Ali as a draft dodger “got one in the White House.” Trump, in Crockett’s telling, is little more than “a grifter who bankrupted 6 casinos”—which itself is “pretty extraordinary considering it’s a rigged business in favor of the house”—who has no discernible skills save for “filing lawsuits and portraying a successful business man as a reality TV actor.”
The post is also a not‑so‑blind item about Jelly Roll, whose teary Grammys sermon about Jesus has been making the social‑media rounds for entirely different reasons. Crockett doesn’t name him, but he doesn’t have to. “When I was at the Grammys the other night I saw a guy get up and talk about Jesus, and then I saw Bad Bunny get up there and talk like Jesus,” he wrote. It couldn’t be more obvious he’s referring to Jelly’s “Jesus is for everybody” acceptance speech followed by his immediate refusal, backstage, to say a single substantive word about ICE or Trump’s escalated immigration crackdown. As always, leave it to a man to weaponize his incompetence: “I’m a dumb redneck,” Jelly Roll pleaded. “I’m so disconnected from what’s happening.” Bad Bunny, meanwhile, literally opened his own Grammy Album of the Year speech with “ICE out” and told tens of millions of viewers that “we’re not aliens, we are humans, and we are Americans” then doubled down a week later on the biggest stage on earth while MAGA influencers lost their minds and Trump denounced the show as “disgusting” and “one of the worst, EVER.” (In reality, “one of the worst, EVER” shows was being broadcast from Turning Point USA’s YouTube channel at the same time.)
Jelly Roll might insist politics and country don’t mix, but Charley Crockett begs to differ. “The country music establishment should be taking notes on a Puerto Rican American who hasn’t forgotten his heritage and brought his culture’s traditional music back to the front, showing the world something new with it,” Crockett writes, essentially telling Nashville that the most genuinely “traditional” artist in the room is the Spanish‑language rapper‑singer who used a Super Bowl slot to protest ICE and celebrate Puerto Rican folk idioms on National TV. And, for what it’s worth, he’s right.
Crockett reserves some of his sharpest language for Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, two billionaires who have quietly become some of Trumpworld’s most powerful validators. “Last time I checked Elon Musk was an immigrant from South Africa but there he is standing in the White House buying our elections,” Crockett wrote, before proposing, with the kind of reverse‑nativist bite you usually only hear from the right, that “we deport his ass and send Peter Thiel back with him since they both openly believe in a post democratic society where men of their class are above the law.” That “post democratic” line isn’t pulled out of thin air; Thiel has spent the better part of a decade musing publicly about his loss of faith in democracy and bankrolling hard‑right candidates, while Musk has used his platforms and private meetings with Trump to play kingmaker on everything from immigration raids to union busting.
The stakes here are not abstract. “Forgive me if I have a problem with a 34 time convicted felon running this country when I lost the right to vote or own a weapon for years over marijuana,” Crockett continued, contrasting the ease with which Trump and his allies shrug off a wall of felony convictions with the way a non‑violent drug charge can permanently warp a working‑class life—something you’d think Jelly Roll would understand, given his own history, but perhaps his recent pardon from Tennessee’s Governor Lee is fogging his vision a bit. Crockett is speaking into a landscape where ICE agents are gunning down U.S. citizens like Renee Good in Minneapolis and then insisting, with full backing from the administration, that the real problem is “professional agitators” and cars as “deadly weapons”—a pattern that’s already drawn fire from people like Bruce Springsteen, who denounced ICE’s “Gestapo tactics” from a New Jersey stage last month.
“As long as you’re hating the oppressed and loving your oppressor you’ll never know why our generation is poorer than our parents and grandparents,” Crockett warned, echoing Martin Luther King Jr.ʼs line about “welfare for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor” and calling the MAGA habit of identifying up—rich men in red hats as folk heroes, migrant families as threats—exactly what it is: “mental slavery.” Freedom, he reminds his followers, has never been a gift: “Every single right we have as a people wasn’t handed to us. We had to fight and take it.”
Read Charley Crockett’s full statement below:
“They keep saying I’m a cosplay cowboy but they love a cosplay president. Some folks have been on here calling Muhammad Ali a draft dodger when yall got one in the White House. When I was at the Grammys the other night I saw a guy get up and talk about Jesus, and then I saw Bad Bunny get up there and talk like Jesus. The country music establishment should be taking notes on a Puerto Rican American who hasn’t forgotten his heritage and brought his culture’s traditional music back to the front, showing the world something new with it. The President is a grifter who bankrupted 6 casinos. That’s pretty extraordinary considering it’s a rigged business in favor of the house. The only thing he’s good at is filing lawsuits and portraying a successful business man as a reality TV actor. Last time I checked Elon Musk was an immigrant from South Africa but there he is standing in the White House buying our elections. Let’s deport his ass and send Peter Thiel back with him since they both openly believe in a post democratic society where men of their class are above the law. Forgive me if I have a problem with a 34 time convicted felon running this country when I lost the right to vote or own a weapon for years over marijuana. As long as you’re hating the oppressed and loving your oppressor you’ll never know why our generation is poorer than our parents and grandparents. As a great man once said it’s welfare for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor. If you can sleep at night licking their boots that’s between you and yours, but that type of thinking isn’t freedom. It’s mental slavery. Every single right we have as a people wasn’t handed to us. We had to fight and take it. Judge a man by how he treats the poor and those who he views as being able to do nothing for him. Don’t forget why Muhammad Ali said ‘I am America.’ Remember the coal miners of Harlan County, Kentucky. I believe in what we can be. Ride on.”
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