President Donald Trump has launched an attack on Snoop Dogg for his Lavender video, which shows the rapper aiming a toy pistol at a clown character parodying the president.

“Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama?” Trump tweeted. “Jail time!”

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

Trump’s condemnation follows his personal lawyer saying Snoop should apologise to the president for the video. Michael Cohen told TMZ he was “shocked” by the clip. “It’s totally disgraceful. Snoop owes the president an apology,” Cohen 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.”

Cohen said he would have felt the same way had a video been made showing Barack Obama when he was president in the same circumstances. “I certainly would not have accepted it if it was President Obama,” he said. “I certainly don’t accept it as President Trump, and in all fairness, it’s not funny, it’s not artistic.”

Cohen said Snoop Dogg and others should “learn that they have to respect the office of the presidency”. “Just because you want to hide behind the guise of artistic capabilities or artistic freedom of speech doesn’t make it right. Snoop knows that, and he played very close to the line here.”

Republican senator Marco Rubio, who ran against Trump in the party’s primaries, also condemned the video. “Snoop shouldn’t have done that. We’ve had presidents assassinated before in this country, so anything like that is really something we should be very careful about,” Rubio told TMZ. “I think people can disagree on policy, but we’ve got to be careful with that kind of thing, because the wrong person sees that and gets the wrong idea, you can have a real problem..”

The rapper insisted he had not been seeking controversy with the video, telling Billboard: “When I be putting shit out, I don’t ever expect or look for a reaction. I just put it out because I feel like it’s something that’s missing. Any time I drop something, I’m trying to fill in a void. I feel like it’s a lot of people making cool records, having fun, partying, but nobody’s dealing with the real issue with this fucking clown as president, and the shit that we dealing with out here, so I wanted to take time out to push pause on a party record and make one of these records for the time being.”