President Donald Trump says he should have left three UCLA basketball players accused of shoplifting in China in jail.
Trump’s tweet Sunday comes after the father of player LiAngelo Ball minimized Trump’s involvement in winning the players’ release in comments to ESPN.
“Who?” LaVar Ball told ESPN on Friday, when asked about Trump’s involvement in the matter. “What was he over there for? Don’t tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out.”
Trump has said he raised the players’ detention with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the leaders’ recent meeting in Beijing.
The players returned to the U.S. last week. They have been indefinitely suspended from the team.
Now that the three basketball players are out of China and saved from years in jail, LaVar Ball, the father of LiAngelo, is unaccepting of what I did for his son and that shoplifting is no big deal. I should have left them in jail!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2017
Shoplifting is a very big deal in China, as it should be (5-10 years in jail), but not to father LaVar. Should have gotten his son out during my next trip to China instead. China told them why they were released. Very ungrateful!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2017
The younger Ball, along with fellow freshmen Jalen Hill and Cody Riley, aren’t with the rest of the No. 23 Bruins, who are in Kansas City to play in the Hall of Fame Classic on Monday and Tuesday. The trio isn’t allowed to suit up, be on the bench for home games or travel with the team.
The players were arrested and questioned about stealing from high-end stores next to the team’s hotel in Hangzhou, where the Bruins stayed before leaving for Shanghai to play Georgia Tech.
UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero said last week that the players stole from three stores.
“As long as my boy’s back here, I’m fine,” LaVar Ball told ESPN. “I’m happy with how things were handled. A lot of people like to say a lot of things that they thought happened over there. Like I told him, ‘They try to make a big deal out of nothing sometimes.’
“I’m from LA. I’ve seen a lot worse things happen than a guy taking some glasses. My son has built up enough character that one bad decision doesn’t define him. Now if you can go back and say when he was 12 years old he was shoplifting and stealing cars and going wild, then that’s a different thing,” he said.
“Everybody gets stuck on the negativity of some things and they get stuck on them too long. That’s not me. I handle what’s going on and then we go from there.”
(AP)
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4 Responses
people either hate Tromp or love him.
If you hate him, he can do NO good, and if you love him, he can do no evil. But sometimes the true is not how people feel politically…..
So because LA coddles these guys they feel entitled to steal from anywhere in the world.
Even when Trump does something appropriate, he can screw it up.
He was right to seek release of 3 Americans arrested in China, as the Chinese judicial system is notoriously arbitrary, capricious and brutal. Yes, they may have broken Chinese law, but they were in China on behalf of America, and the president was right to protect them, because that is a presidential responsibility. And the 3 young men involved duly expressed their gratitude to the president.
Apparently, a father of one of the young men said something negative about Trump, and Trump’s response was that he should have refrained from doing his duty as president. He seems to think that if he is entitled to a kiss on the cheek every time he does something for someone. He does not understand that he has presidential duties regardless of what people say about him.
georgeg, all agree that stealing is wrong. Perhaps one angle on this comes from their different treatment of thieves than ours. Imagine that your friend was caught stealing in Saudi Arabia and they announced that his hand would be chopped off. Would you say, well, too bad, you think you can just steal and get away with it? I think you’d yell and scream until helped get your friend out of this. So I don’t think you should criticize Trump for saving these guys from being punished. I don’t think he was trying “coddle” them.