Snoop Dogg should send Donald Trump a fruit basket.

As I posted earlier, Snoop has a new video for “Lavender” out this week, and in the video he uses a toy gun on a clown dressed as Donald Trump. This morning, Trump finally got around to tweeting about it.

In a tweetstorm that included commentary on his tax returns, and his upcoming never ending campaign stops, Trump took a swipe at Snoop Dogg for the video.

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

The power of Donald Trump’s tweets have become rather legendary. A few words from Trump and your name is not only reaching his millions of followers, but they are almost guaranteed to appear in every publication known to man. You literally can’t buy this kind of publicity.

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!
~ President Donald J. Trump

I don’t know that anyone would have called for jail time…but it would not have been well received, Mr. President. That said, Trump isn’t wrong that the general reaction would be considerably different if the target of the fake assassination was Barack Obama. Even rapper turned actor, Ice-T agrees with Trump’s sentiment.

“I think it would be terrible,” he added when asked what if it was Obama instead. “Obama wasn’t the same kind of guy as Trump. It was very hard to make an Obama joke it wasn’t because of his race, it was because Obama was such a smooth character.”

As we’ve seen though, assassination jokes are cool again. Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.

I hope Snoop is celebrating, in his LA mansion today, perhaps sipping on Gin and Juice while texting Martha Stewart. Privately he should be thanking the President for giving him the exposure. The creators of the video knew the controversy would garnish headlines, when they released it. As I stated previously, it’s kind of the point.

Donald Trump, clowns and dirty cops. No thank you. However, it’s controversial so of course people will talk about it. Thus it works. It’s called marketing. The more shocking it is, the more keystrokes are wasted on it.

To get the coveted Tweet response from Donald Trump? It’s like winning the PR lottery, the mega millions not some scratch off either. Love his tweets or hate them, Trump’s 140 character messages shape the media narrative, if you can get your project injected into that endless cycle of chatter, you win. One guy is already “demanding” an apology for the video on TMZ.

“Snoop owes the president an apology,” he said. “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.”

If Snoop Dogg can be lucky enough to have someone now call for some kind of ban. he will have the hat trick of Trump driven social media exposure. He may have his biggest commercial success in years. I more or less expect someone in the media to interpret Trump’s tweet to mean that he plans to prosecute Snoop Dogg, if that happens the rapper should go ahead and plan for his own private island worth of sales.

Snoop should pull out his personal stationery, I imagine something with embossed greenery, and write an old fashioned “Thank You” note to Donald Trump. I’m just saying…