Boy, did Donald Trump have a busy last few weeks in office after the 2020 election! There was the desperate begging state officials to not say that he was a loser. There was the whole stealing classified documents so they could be stored in the bathroom at his discount rack Xanadu in Florida. There was plotting out an insurrection to overturn the election.
And oh yeah, feuding with Snoop Dogg, the rapper that Rolling Stone reminds us in the course of this story they once dubbed “America’s Most Lovable Pimp.”
Trump wasn’t mad about that, we don’t think, but who knows? Would anyone be surprised if he got mad that a magazine, especially one with the cultural footprint of Rolling Stone, named someone else its most lovable anything? Pimp, homicidal maniac, Panera breakfast sandwich …
Anyway. Early in Trump’s presidency, Snoop had hated the guy. First he filmed a video in which he aimed a toy gun at a clown dressed to look like Trump. Then he told a Sirius XM radio show:
“I don’t give a fuck, I tell ’em straight up, motherfucker: If you like that nigga, you motherfuckin’ racist,” Snoop Dogg said about Trump, his MAGA fans, and the president’s pal Kanye West in 2018. “Fuck you and fuck him. Now what?”
Trump had responded on then-Twitter:
“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!”
The flaw in Trump’s logic here is that Snoop would not have done that to Obama, because Obama was not a galactic asshole. But logic and self-awareness are two traits as foreign to Donald Trump as salad.
Snoop later allegedly softened on Trump, supposedly because he was impressed by Trump’s willingness to pardon or commute the prison sentences of various federal offenders.
In fact, he was impressed enough that in late 2020, he brought the case of Harry-O, a founder of Death Row Records who had already served 30 years in prison for cocaine trafficking and attempted murder and wasn’t due to be released until late 2028, to a couple of activists who were working to squeeze some more pardons out of Trump before he left office.
Trump was amenable, the pardon paperwork was drafted, and Harry-O’s name was added to the exoneration list.
Then, a couple of days before he left office, some of Trump’s advisers, who were already not very onboard with even his modest gestures at criminal justice reform, reminded Trump of some of Snoop’s earlier comments about him. This got the big baby all riled up, and in a fury, he ordered Harry-O’s name be taken off the exoneration list and who knows, maybe he had someone bring him the paperwork so he could eat it.
It’s worth taking a step back here to note the timing. This reversal happened on January 18. Trump was about to get dragged kicking and screaming out of office in the wake of the January 6 attacks, he was in the middle of being impeached for a second time and was facing another Senate trial, he was busy trying to pack anything not nailed down to take with him, he was fuming that he had even lost and was still incessantly complaining about a “rigged election,” and he was still the most powerful person in the world.
Yet certain bigots in his administration thought this issue was important enough to goad Trump into a tantrum and, according to RS, make him say “Well, fuck him” about Snoop Dogg.
Word got back to Snoop that Trump was killing Harry-O’s clemency. What to do?
Ideas that were kicked around included asking Snoop Dogg to post something positive about Trump on Twitter or Instagram. Maybe he could profusely apologize to the then-president, publicly or in private? Something — anything — to appease the temperamental politician and former game-show host. […]
No one close to the rapper thought this was likely or doable. Snoop didn’t want to feud with Trump any longer, but he didn’t want to come off as a toady, either.
Thus did a generous act of mercy get held hostage to whatever in the fuck this was.
The solution was this: One of the activists was working on a documentary about his efforts to get Harry-O pardoned. He had some unreleased footage of Snoop saying nice things about Trump. So his team managed to get the footage to Trump, who watched it, pronounced his ass sufficiently kissed for the moment, and reversed his reversal of Harry-O’s pardon.
Snoop recently told an interviewer he has “nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump,” a quote nice enough that Trump’s campaign has put it into a couple of email blasts. So all is forgiven, at least for the next ten minutes.
OPEN THREAD.
[Rolling Stone / YouTube]
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