After bonding on The Apprentice back in 2007, Snoop Dogg and former one-term president Donald Trump have had an up-and-down relationship ever since. The nadir of their unlikely friendship came during the twice-impeached Trump’s term in the White House, during which Snoop released the Trump-bashing single “M.A.C.A. (Make America Crip Again).”
The 2017 song featured the lines, “The president says he wants to make America great again. F–k that s–t, we going to make America Crip again… don’t you look strange having all that power but you won’t make change.”
“M.A.C.A.” was released seven months after Snoop parodied Trump in the video for “Lavender (Nightfall Remix),” which featured a clown version of the former reality star named Ronald Klump. The satire of current events had Clown-in-Chief Klump holding a press conference to announce the deportation of all dogs. In a Billboard interview at the time, Snoop ticked off a long list of problems he had with the real estate mogul who is currently making a third bid for the presidency. “The [Muslim] ban that this motherf–er tried to put up; him winning the presidency; police being able to kill motherf–kers… and get away with it (and) people being in jail for weed for 20, 30 years,” Snoop said at the time of Trump’s divisive actions and statements.
Trump, as is his wont, responded to the diss days later with an insult on his socials, referring to what he deemed the multi-platinum rapper’s “failing career.”
But in a weekend interview with the U.K.’s The Sunday Times (paywalled) it appears that one of Trump’s final acts in office before losing to President Joe Biden in the Nov. 2020 election left a lasting impact on Snoop. “Donald Trump? He ain’t done nothing wrong to me,” Snoop reportedly told the paper. “He has done only great things for me. He pardoned Michael Harris.”
Back in Jan. 2021 — just weeks after a mob of Trump loyalists attacked the U.S. Capitol building in an attempt to stop the certification of Biden’s victory — Snoop thanked Trump for his last-minute grant of clemency to Death Row Records co-founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris amid a flurry of 140 commutations and pardons doled out on one of his last days in office.
“I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump,” Snoop told the Times about his apparent change of heart about the former president who was ordered last week to pay advice columnist E. Jean Carrol $83.3 million in a defamation trial that is one of a handful of cases Trump is facing in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington that have led to four indictments and 91 felony charges.
Snoop was signed to Death Row at the beginning of his career in 1993 and the rapper acquired the label’s catalog in 2022. Harris served 30 years of a 25-to-life sentence for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder before his sentence was commuted.
After telling Big Boy’s Neighborhood in June 2020 that he planned to vote for the first time because he could not stomach “one more year” of Trump’s chaotic rule, the rapper was more circumspect about where his ballot might go in what is expected to be another showdown between Trump and Biden. “I may have to,” Snoop said about whether he feels pressure to declare for a presidential candidate. “Because there are mixed views on that, so I want to see what the people say.”
