Snoop Dogg literally took aim at Donald Trump in the new music video for “Lavender.” And Sen. Marco Rubio says he isn’t pleased.
The Jesse Wellens and James DeFina-directed video includes a scene in which the Long Beach rapper pretends to open fire on a clown-faced Trump lookalike. The gun is depicted as a toy that shoots out a “bang” sign rather than a bullet; however, Rubio insists the imagery crossed the line.
TMZ caught up with the Florida Republican at Reagan National Airport, where he criticized the music video for mocking an assassination:
“Snoop shouldn’t have done that. You know, we’ve had presidents assassinated before in this country, so anything like that is really something that you should be very careful about,” he explained. “I think people can disagree on policy. We’ve got to be very careful with that kind of thing because the wrong person sees that and gets the wrong idea, you can have a real problem. So, you know, I’m not sure what Snoop was thinking. He should think about that a little bit.”
Snoop has been a vocal critic of Trump since the 2016 election race. In a recent interview with Billboard magazine, the 45-year-old rapper discussed the inspiration behind “Lavender” and further explained his resentment for Trump.
"The ban that this motherfucker tried to put up; him winning the presidency; police being able to kill motherfuckers and get away with it; people being in jail for weed for 20, 30 years and motherfuckers that’s not black on the streets making money off of it,” he said, “but if you got color or ethnicity connected to your name, you’ve been wrongfully accused or locked up for it, and then you watching people not of color position themselves to get millions and billions off of it. It’s a lot of clown shit going on that we could just sit and talk on the phone all day about, but it’s a few issues that we really wanted to lock into [for the video] like police, the president and just life in general."
This is not the first time a rapper has been in hot water over presidential assassination imagery. Bay Area rapper Paris got in some trouble back in 1992 for the content and cover art of his song "Bush Killa," about the first President Bush.
