Earlier this week, in his "Lavender" music video, Snoop Dogg shot Donald Trump. Except he didn't really shoot Trump; he just used one of those toy guns that has a flag with the word "bang" on it inside. And it wasn't really Trump, anyway; it was a clown version of Trump, in a music video where everyone except Snoop was a clown. It seemed pretty innocuous when I watched it at the time, but Snoop's video has now become a conservative hot-button issue, and Trump has now rage-tweeted about it.
Yesterday, former Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio implied that a video like that could influence someone to attempt to assassinate the president. That seemed pretty ridiculous at the time. But now the actual president has had something to say about it, doing the weird false-equivalency thing where he imagines it happening to Obama:
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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2017
Counterpoint: If a rapper is relevant enough to get an angry tweet from the president, that rapper can't be described as having a "failing career." (In fact, it's entirely possible that no rapper in history has been relevant for longer than Snoop.) And in any case, we all know that Trump is still mad about Snoop's dick-size joke at Trump's Comedy Central Roast six years ago.
