Trump fires back after Snoop video
Tweets angry reaction to scene in which rapper aims toy gun at ‘Ronald Klump’
Snoop Dogg’s new “Lavender” music video features a world of clowns, and one is clearly a U.S. President Donald Trump parody.
In one climactic moment, Snoop Dogg aims a toy gun at that clown — “Ronald Klump” — and pulls the trigger. Glitter and a banner reading “Bang!” pop out.
Trump weighed in on that scene Wednesday morning, tweeting, “Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!”
Reports came out Tuesday that the Secret Service is aware of the video. A spokesperson for the agency did not immediately respond to an inquiry from the Washington Post.
The song focuses on police brutality and other issues. Snoop Dogg told Billboard that he wanted to make a song “that was not controversial but real — real to the voice of the people who don’t have a voice.”
The video’s “Klump” scene has sparked plenty of controversy. It earned a rebuke from Sen. Marco Rubio, a self-avowed hip-hop fan; TMZ recorded him Tuesday saying that the rapper “shouldn’t have done that.
We’ve had presidents assassinated in this country before, so anything like that is really something we should be careful about.”
Fox & Friends, a show Trump is known to watch, ran a segment about the video Wednesday morning.
Rapper Ice-T has weighed in, too, saying that he “thought the video was good,” but that it made him nervous.
“It’s basically him saying everybody’s a clown, including Trump, which I think we all agree. The part where you point the gun at the president, that’s against the law, you gotta know that,” Ice-T said in a video posted by TMZ. “You can’t kill the president, but he pushed the line and he had the edge right there.”
Ice-T said the reaction would “be terrible” if former president Barack Obama had been mocked in such a fashion, adding, “but Obama wasn’t the same kind of guy as Trump. It was very hard to make an Obama joke because of his race, and Obama was such a smooth character. I think Trump brings a lot of these jokes onto himself.”
With the video’s release this week, Snoop Dogg told Billboard that he wasn’t looking for a response from Trump or anyone else with that particular scene.
“I don’t ever expect or look for a reaction. I just put it out because I feel like it’s something that’s missing. Anytime I drop something, I’m trying to fill in a void,” he told the outlet.
“I feel like it’s a lot of people making cool records, having fun, partying, but nobody’s dealing with the real issue with this . . . clown as president.”
"It’s basically him saying everybody’s a clown, including Trump, which I think we all agree." RAPPER ICE-T ON SNOOP DOGG’S NEW VIDEO