Trump To Law Enforcement: Do Better, People!
[guest post by Dana]
President Trump was interviewed yesterday by Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade. When asked about how the President would change things, with regard to law enforcement and the killing of George Lloyd, Trump said…well…you can read below what he said:
KILMEADE: So you have a pandemic and a national unrest. Two unprecedented things that I would argue in my lifetime and probably yours. But the big picture I thought we would be talking about the day after George Floyd’s tragic death, which I think you agree it seems that law enforcement — you don’t want to convict someone before they have trial. But 96 percent of the country thinks that was out of bounds — the knee on the neck killed him.
I’m one of them. Again wait (ph) to see where the trial comes out. But this is the one stat I’m going to bring you to, and I’m going to ask you if could attack this.
According to a Axios-Ipsos poll, 70 percent of white Americans say they trust the local police. Only 36 percent of African-Americans do. How do you attack that problem? How do you change things?
TRUMP: Well I think it’s a very sad problem. As you know as a Republican I’m doing very well with African-Americans and with the vote with the — in polls and everything — especially I mean I haven’t seen one very recently because you had the plague come in from China.
So that changed things up, but we had the best economy ever. We had the best numbers for African-American on employment and unemployment in history. Best homeownership — best everything. We had the best numbers in everything — not only African-American, but the African-American numbers were great.
KILMEADE: How do you handle the law enforcement part?
TRUMP: Well I think you have to get better.
KILMEADE: How do you handle the law enforcement part of this?
TRUMP: They have to get better than what they’ve been doing. I mean obviously that was a terrible thing. And I’ve spoken about it numerous times in various speeches.
And what’s interesting is I spoke about it when we launched a very successful rocket — a tremendous program that culminated on that day and obviously it goes on from there.
But I then made a speech and it was a speech about the rocket, and I devoted 25 percent of the speech probably to what happened — or more — to what happened with respect to George — George Floyd, and it was — and then you listen to this, he doesn’t talk about George Floyd. The rocket went off, I then I made a speech, and I talked about George Floyd, but they said he didn’t talk about George Floyd.
Half — maybe even almost half of the speech, but a large portion of the speech was devoted exactly to that. And so, you know, with — with the media you basically — and basically no matter what you do, it’s never going to be good enough. But the people understand it.
KILMEADE: Right.
TRUMP: And that’s one of the beauties of social media. I mean, I would love not to even bother with social media, but I’m able to get my word out beautifully by social media fortunately. You use social media too.
KILMEADE: Right, also —
TRUMP: But we have to get the word out. Look, we have to — Brian, we have to get the police departments, everybody has to do better, has to do better. This is a long-term problem. This didn’t happen today.
This happened — I mean, a guy like Sleepy Joe Biden was in there for 43 years, and he says, I think we should do this, I saw today, he took his mask off for the first time in a while, I haven’t seen his face for a long time. And he said, I think we should do this, or I think we should do that.
And actually then he started speaking through the mask again. He feels comfortable with the mask on I think, and — even though there was nobody anywhere near him, which is interesting, but he made a statement about what he should do. I said, he’s been there for 43 years, he was vice president for 8 years, he didn’t do a thing. His crime bill was a disaster.
–Dana