One week ago, Derek Chauvin and three other Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd. Thus far, Chauvin is the only one who has been arrested – he was the one who put his knee on Floyd’s neck. It’s completely asinine that the three other cops have not been arrested and charged (they’ve only been fired). Over the weekend, George Floyd’s brother Philonise Floyd spoke to Al Sharpton on Rev. Al’s MSNBC show. Philonise spoke about his two calls with Joe Biden and Donald Trump:
As protests erupt across the country, Philonise Floyd virtually spoke with MSNBC’s Al Sharpton on Saturday and talked about the conversations he had with President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden, who is the presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2020 presidential election.
“I never had to beg a man before but I asked [Biden] could he please, please get justice for my brother, please. Because I need it, I just don’t want to see him on a shirt like those other guys. Nobody deserves that,” said Floyd, who was joined by his nephew Brandon Williams and their family attorney Ben Crump.
Meanwhile, Floyd said his call with Trump was much different. “It was so fast. He didn’t give me the opportunity to even speak. It was hard. I was trying to talk to him but he just kept like pushing me off like ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about.’ I just told him I want justice. I said that I can’t believe that they committed a modern-day lynching in broad daylight,” he shared. “I can’t stand for that, that hurt me. I just don’t understand, man,” he said as he became emotional and fought back tears. “Why we have to go through this? Why we gotta have all this pain, man? I love my brother. I’m never going to see him again.”
Also during the MSNBC interview, Floyd gave his thoughts about former officer Derek Chauvin and the other police officers in the nine-minute video, which shows Floyd’s brother George groaning in pain while bystanders plead with Chauvin to be more gentle as he repeatedly asks for help.
“They all need to be convicted of first-degree murder, and given the death penalty because they didn’t care about what they wanted to do with my brother. He wasn’t a person to them, he was scum. He was nothing,” he told Sharpton. “I can imagine how many people they did like that. I don’t need them on the streets to kill anybody else. I’m hurt, my family is hurt. His kids are hurt. They will grow up without a father. Everybody is crying and in pain right now. So if they could do anything please arrest those other officers.”
I’m including the video interview below. The fact that Trump couldn’t even feign empathy for a few minutes on a phone call is not surprising. The fact that Trump spoke OVER a grieving brother is not surprising either. But… Jesus, it just underlines how we’re without any kind of leadership, right? We have zero ACTUAL leadership, and we have no “healer in chief.” This interview is heartbreaking.
Screencap courtesy of MSNBC.
Add it to the list of non-redeemable qualities. “Does not listen with intent to understand.”
Trump is an ass
^evergreen comment
Trump wants the Black vote, or to at least be able to say that he and his staff are’t racists because they called the family. His team knew he couldn’t do this correctly, but they can spin it. Trump also may have insisted.
This reminds me of that senator during some hearing, the Mueller hearings?, making that Black female White House staffer stand next to him silently to prove that the administration wasn’t racist. Uh, making POC props is racism, dude, particularly when you use them to communicate your points and don’t allow them to speak for themselves, like human beings instead of props. This call will be used as a prop.
Don’t forget the awful call he did regarding the 4 soldiers who died in the ambush a few years ago. 3 white, 1 black. Guess which family he was awful to.
That was former Representative Mark Meadows, who is now Trump’s Chief of Staff, and the woman was Lynne Patton, who had previously worked as an event planner for the Trump Foundation and was given a nice position at HUD.
Thanks, LightPurple. I should have looked it up.
My brother died coming up to 15 years ago now in a traffic accident. It broke my heart and split my life in two – everything becomes “before X died” or “after X died”. That said, I can’t even begin to comprehend what George Floyd’s family and friends are going through.
Even more unimaginable is how the leader of the USA can’t put aside his petty narcissism for five minutes to listen to this man’s family.
Who I am kidding, this is exactly the type of person the orange pillock is. I suppose I’m surprised he couldn’t event pretend to be a human being for five minutes.
“He didn’t give me the opportunity to even speak” says it ALL about Trump.
This comes as zero shock. 45’s call had nothing to do with empathy and everything to do with his personal optics so he could get on Twitter and congratulate himself on saying words to a black person.
Trump talked about himself, of course.
He must have told them how Floyd’s modern day lynching is comparable to how he’s been lynched by the fake news. He must have spun it into his own victim-hood. At the end of the call Floyd’s brother would have wondered if *he* needed to pay condolences to Melania now. SMH.
This is just so awful I have no words.
An aside on the Floyd brothers, yesterday, they were doing an interview on CNN with Don Lemon and said they had not heard directly from the Minneapolis Police Department. Lemon patched them into an interview reporter Sara Sidner was doing with the Police Chief. She relayed their questions to the police chief, who said he believed all four officers were complicit in the murder, as is any cop who doesn’t speak up. The police chief removed his cap as a show of respect for the Floyd family. It was touching and poignant. All involved were crying. And Sara Sidner has been outstanding covering the situation in Minneapolis all week.
Hope & Ivanka probably had to wear low cut shirts and bribe him to the phone with extra scoops of ice cream to get him to even do that much. I always wonder why the media complains about “still no condolences from Trump for the family.” Like which family wants a racist a-hole to monotone-read fake condolences off a card like a captive in a hostage video?
I’m surprised the family talked to Trump at all, honestly. That’s more than I would have done.
My father is a narcissist, phonecalls with him go the same way. I cant get a word in