Donald Trump’s lawyer has sounded off on a new music video from rapper Snoop Dogg in which he parodies an assassination of President Donald Trump.
In the climactic scene of the ‘Lavender’ video, the 45-year-old rapper takes out a fake gun and points it towards a clown-like president Donald Trump character with painted orange face.
Michael Cohen told TMZ: ‘It’s totally disgraceful. Snoop owes the president an apology.
‘There’s absolutely nothing funny about an assassination attempt on a president, and I’m really shocked at him, because I thought he was better than that.’
Cohen’s comments come as Secret Service agents also told TMZ that they are ‘aware’ of the video.
The Secret Service response is similar to the one given after Madonna’s threat to blow up the White House while speaking at a Women’s March event the day after Trump’s inauguration.
Cohen said he did not understand ‘the artistic value’ of the mock assassination and elaborated: ‘If you have a protest, that’s fine, make your point.
‘But it should never be, he has to learn that they need to respect the office of the presidency.’
He added that Snoop could join his diversity coalition or ‘other things’ in order to help ‘inner cities’ with ‘the violence and the drugs’ and concluded: ‘Shame on you, Snoop.
‘You should be better than that.’
Republican Senator and supposed West Coast Rap supporter Marco Rubio told TMZ while at Reagan National Airport on Monday that he disagreed with Snoop’s video.
Snoop Dogg was born and raised in Long Beach, California.
‘Snoop shouldn’t have done that. We’ve had presidents assassinated before in this country so anything like that is something people should be very careful about,’ Rubio said.
He said people can disagree with policy but if the wrong person sees that and ‘gets the wrong idea you can have a real problem.’
The clip, which dropped Sunday and is co-directed by Jesse Wellens and James DeFina, focuses on current events including a parody version of Trump named Ronald Klump.
At one point Clown-in-Chief Klump holds a press conference to announce the deportation of all dogs, spelled ‘doggs.’
Justified actor Michael Rapaport also stars in the video as a suburban clown father who gets stopped by the clown police and shot with a glitter gun.
This was a reference last year’s killing of Philando Castile, whose shooting by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop was live-streamed by Castile’s girlfriend.
‘It’s all on camera and they still don’t believe you / Clownin’ around — don’t come your clown a** ’round here, n***a,’ Snoop Dogg raps in ‘Lavender,’ his take on an instrumental track by Canadian group BadBadNotGood.
The message was clear from the musician as he spoke to Billboard about his thoughts on the president.
Snoop said: ‘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 f**king clown as president, and the sh** that we dealing with out here, so I wanted to take time out to push pause on a party record and make one of these records for the time being.’
The artist explained what motivated him when he was writing the track.
‘Making a song that was not controversial but real — real to the voice of the people who don’t have a voice. It’s not like [Jesse] told me to make a record to express what I’m expressing on the song, but there were certain things that he said that brought that feeling, to make me want to express that when I was writing.’
But the hip hop star said he’s not looking for any kind of reaction for the video.
‘When I be putting sh** out, 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. Any time I drop something, I’m trying to fill in a void.’
The star also listed his grievances with the president as he concluded: ‘It’s a lot of clown sh** 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.’
Lavender will be on Snoop’s forthcoming album, the follow-up to 2015’s Coolaid.
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