Marco Rubio isn’t clowning around — he thinks Snoop Dogg might have crossed a line with his new video “Lavender,” in which the Doggfather pretends to assassinate a clown-faced Donald Trump stand-in with a toy gun.
The Republican senator and self-avowed hip-hop fan — one dubbed “Little Marco” by Trump — took the rapper to task on Monday.
“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,” Rubio told TMZ.
The senator continued, “I think people can disagree … [but] you’ve got to be very careful about that kind of thing, because the wrong person sees that and gets the wrong idea, you can have a real problem. So I’m not sure what Snoop was thinking, he should think about that a little bit.”
In the video, directors Jesse Wellens and James DeFina depict an America where everyone’s a clown, including president “Ronald Klump.”
After Klump holds a press conference to announce the deportation of all dogs, Snoop chains up the Clown-in-Chief and shoots him with a toy gun.
In an interview with Billboard, Wellens explained the concept behind the video: “When I originally wrote the idea of the video, the video of [Philando Castile] getting shot came out online and it was causing riots. We just kind of wanted to bring the clowns out, because it’s clownery — it’s ridiculous what’s happening.”
“As America, it just doesn’t seem like we’re very respected right now,” he added.
Watch Rubio’s reaction in the video.