President Trump was dismissive during a condolence phone call with the family of George Floyd, according to the deceased man’s brother.
Trump “didn’t give me the opportunity to even speak,” Philonise Floyd said Saturday on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” about the phone call the family received from the president.
“It hurt me,” Floyd said of the president’s call, which he also described as “so fast.”
George Floyd was killed Monday during an arrest by Minnesota police when officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck while he was restrained. He was 46.
“He didn’t give me the opportunity to even speak,” Floyd said. “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,” Floyd said. “I said that I couldn’t believe that they committed a modern-day lynching in broad daylight. I can’t stand for that. I can’t. And it hurt me.”
Chauvin has been arrested on murder charges but the other officers involved in the incident have not been charged with a crime.
“They all need to be convicted of first-degree murder and given the death penalty,” Floyd told MSNBC host Al Sharpton. “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 [to them]. I can imagine how many people they did like that.”
The response to George Floyd’s death, along with the deaths of several other African-Americans, from local and national leaders has set off days of protests.
“I just don’t understand, man,” said Floyd. “Why we gotta go through this? Why we gotta have all this pain, man? I love my brother. I’m never going to see him again.”
Trump has been accused of being dismissive or insensitive during condolence phone calls in the past. In October 2017, Trump allegedly told Myeshia Johnson, a war widow, that her husband, Sergeant La David Johnson, “knew what he was signing up for” after he was killed in action in Niger.
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