Well, we really are living in a different era. Today President Trump tweeted out his displeasure over a new music video by rapper Snoop Dogg:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/841967881516679168

As weird as it is to have the President bothering with something like this, Trump does have a point. Snoop Dogg’s new video features a clown version of President Trump (note: most of the people in the video are clowns). But clown-Trump doesn’t just appear in the video. Near the end, he is shot by Snoop Dogg, except the gun isn’t a real gun it’s a clown gun that puts out a flag that says “Bang.” So this isn’t quite an execution scene but it’s probably as close as you can get without a visit from the Secret Service.

How would people react if this were Obama? It’s a fair question. If a famous recording artist had made a similar video showing a mock execution of President Obama it would have set off a lot of alarm bells. Would it have resulted in jail time? I doubt it but certainly a lot of public scorn and possibly a campaign aimed at depressing the artist’s sales or even an attempt to get him dumped from his label.

But I think all of that would have happened without Obama’s prompting. Maybe he would have eventually been asked about it, but he wouldn’t have brought it up himself. What’s different here is that three days after the video appeared, the President himself is calling Snoop Dogg out on Twitter. Unfortunately, I think that’s only going to help Snoop Dogg and possibly inspire other artists to try similar stunts.

Here’s the video. Needless to say, there is a lot of NSFW language here. Really, it’s Snoop Dogg: