“For all the hate, I’m going to answer with love,” the Long Beach-born rapper born Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. said in a recent video posted to his Instagram. He received fierce backlash after performing at a Jan. 18 event in Washington D.C. called the Crypto Ball, which celebrated the dawning election of Donald Trump.
Smoking and listening to The Winans’ “Ain’t No Need to Worry” in his car, Snoop said, “Y’all can’t hate enough I love too much. Get your life right stop worrying about mine. I’m cool, I’m together. Still a Black man. Still 100% Black. All out ’til you ball out, or ’til you fall out.”
Trump did not attend the Crypto Ball, and the event wasn’t a part of the once and current president’s official inaugural weekend program. But the Crypto Ball, held at the Andrew W. Mellon auditorium two days before the inauguration, was an explicit celebration of his victory in the 2024 election, and attended by Trump boosters and leaders in the cryptocurrency market, per Reuters.
The rappers Soulja Boy and Rick Ross also performed at the Crypto Ball, but the ire drawn by Snoop was particularly pointed, as the 53-year-old rapper and entrepreneur has been vocally critical of Trump in the past.
Snoop pantomimed shooting a clown dressed as Trump for his 2017 remix of the BadBadNotGood song “Lavender,” and referenced him again in the song “M.A.C.A (Make America Crip Again)” from the same year. “The president say he wants to Make America Great Again, F— that s—,” he rapped.
At the end of Trump’s first term in office, Snoop called the president a “f—ing weirdo” on X, telling his fans, “if you voted for him, I have no problem with that, but if you’re still with him, f— you.”
But things seemed to change in 2021, when Trump commuted the sentence of Michael “Harry-O” Harris, the co-founder of Death Row Records who had served 30 years of a 25-to-life sentence for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. “That’s great work for the president and his team on the way out. They did some great work while they was in there,” Snoop told the New York Post at the time.
He changed his tune completely last year, when in conversation with The Sunday Times said, “Donald Trump? He ain’t done nothing wrong to me. He has done only great things for me… I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump.”
he musicians who answered the call to perform at the Jan. 20 inauguration also faced backlash from fans, and some, like Snoop, have responded with evasive calls for peace and privacy.
“I’m not political. I’m not out here trying to tell anybody who they should vote for,” the rapper Nelly told Willie D on YouTube after performing at the inauguration. “But what I will say is that, I respect the office. This isn’t politics. The politics, for me, is over. He won! He’s the president.”
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