Don Lemon Lets Trump Have It On George Floyd: ‘That’s How Black People Feel’

"No one wants to hear from the Birther-in-Chief," the CNN host says.
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CNN’s Don Lemon says President Donald Trump’s comments ring hollow when it comes to the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed during an arrest in Minneapolis, setting off days of unrest.

“Nobody wants to hear from the White House or the attorney general right now,” Lemon said.

Video of the arrest shows Floyd, in handcuffs and face-down on the street, saying “I can’t breathe” as an officer presses a knee into his neck. He was pronounced dead later.

Trump called the footage a “shocking sight” and said the FBI is investigating.

But Lemon pointed toward Trump’s long history of racist rhetoric as indirectly “contributing” to the situation with a brief recap of the president’s lowlights ― and said “no one wants to hear” from him right now.

Trump, he reminded viewers, called for the death penalty for the now-exonerated Central Park Five, claimed there were “very fine people on both sides” when white supremacists clashed with protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and was a leader of the racist “birther” conspiracy that falsely claimed then-President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.

And Lemon pointed out that Trump attacked NFL players as “sons of bitches” for taking a knee in silent protest of police violence against Black Americans.

Lemon said:

No one wants to hear from the man who said there are ‘very fine people on both sides.’ Do you understand what I am saying? No one wants to hear from the person that they perceive as contributing to this situation, situations like this, in this society. Not directly, but allowing people like that to think they can get away from this. No one wants to hear from the Birther-in-Chief, from the ‘sons of bitches’-calling person, who says that athletes, who are kneeling for this very reason. No one wants to hear from that.

“That’s how Black people feel,” Lemon said later. “The person who said, from klansmen and racists and Nazis and anti-Semites, that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ no one wants to hear that.”

See more of his commentary below:

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