Trump compares cop who shoots a man many times in the back to a golfer who misses a putt: How can the President's speech be justified?

He can do no wrong in the eyes of his base, no matter how stupid or hateful.
Just wondering if his base is still big enough to win come November ?

@SQUEEKY He just got endorsed by six Democrats in MN. Crazy times.

It can’t be. Every time he says something like this, I hope somebody blinks and wakes up. It’s not just stupid, it’s evil.

Imagine this guy tucking your little one into bed and saying something comforting to her before she sleeps. Can you? I wonder how any of us can sleep.

@KNOWITALL Which democrats in MN, and for what reason?

He has NO handlers as he refuses to be handled. The harder they try, the wilder he gets. Like you, in my mind, it CANNOT be justified!!! I’m sure that at least 2 of his base will be here shortly to explain why he was correct. I awaken every morning & pinch myself in the hopes that I’ve been reliving the shower/death scene in Dallas!!!

The Republican Party is so fucking desperate to be in power that they are willing to sell our collective souls in order to get what they want. IF they were honest, they don’t want trump anymore than I do, but they crave the power!!!

I just saw that. Unbelievable.

Well 35 % of the voters will support him in November (MSNBC last week) and a whole of Putin’s votes, maybe he’ll get close.

When you are the dictator you get t to say STUPID stuff ! And still can’ t drop a putt at five feet.

CHOKE

Justification: the cops told him to get on his knees and he failed to react.

Re-run it on Saturday Night Live.

Ain’t t awful. Isn’t it fun to wallow in negativity and slime.

Didn’t have any negativity to wallow in until 2016!!!

@YARNLADY That does not justify shooting him 7 times. In the back.
To compare it to missing a putt is unbelievable.

@YARNLADY “Justified”? There were two police officers right there next to him. Neither tried to restrain him before shooting him in the back at point blank range.
There is no justification for that. At all. I am surprised that you would say that.

I honestly dont think his handlers get final say at this point.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I watched the entire interview. What he actually said was words to the effect that even a good cop can choke LIKE A PROFESSIONAL GOLFER. If you have never played golf, perhaps you did not understand his meaning. He did NOT compare the shooting itself to golf.

^Still a horrible analogy.

@crazyguy I watched the entire interview, too. The analogy was wildly inappropriate. It’s that simple.

He simply will say anything outrageous for media exposure ..all this just to brand himself.

Unfortunately for him “mug sticks” so if he thinks that later he would be sought for branding a

product etc, he had better think twice..or in his case think First before speaking.

He would be branded as the worst leader in the World!

@crazyguy: My question was accurately written – he compared the shooting to a golfer making a bad putt.

@jca2: No, he did not. He compared the act of choking in the two situations.

Choking in a golf game does not maim another person.

@crazyguy: ”But they choke,” the president continued. “Just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot putt.”

As I wrote “Trump compares cop who shoots a man many times in the back to a golfer who misses a putt.”

Trump’s analogy really makes no sense.

The cop didn’t choke! He got exactly what he wanted, a dead man.

If the cop had choked, Jacob Blake would still be alive.

@zenvelo, when did he die? I missed that.

I don’t think he died. He is paralyzed.

I wondered if @zenvelo had heard something this morning.

I googled it just now and didn’t see that he died, @canidmajor.

@canidmajor @chyna My bad, I should have just said the cop hit his target.

@candidmajor: As a golfer who often misses his putts, I understood exactly what Trump was saying. However, I don’t think the concept of choking is unique to golf. Have you ever seen a professional tennis player double fault at 30–30? Or an NFL quarterback completely miss a wide-open receiver? That, my friend, is choking.

I personally think choking is not the right word for what happened to the cop. Panic comes closer to it.

@crazyguy No one is disputing his use of the word “choke” or how it applies to golfing. Some of us here actually have A) some life experience, and B) the ability to infer from context. We knew what he meant. We still maintain that making a comparison in this manner is wholly inappropriate.

Apparently, you don’t. And just how sad is that?

@candidmajor: How else would you describe the actions of a well-trained, inherently good cop, that, in the heat of the moment, does something that his training would argue against? Would you be happier if Trump said a professional athlete instead of a pro golfer?

@crazyguy How do you know the cop was a well-trained, inherently good cop? How do you know anything about him? He might take pay offs. He might be racist and pull over Black men all the time. He may be inappropriate around women.
There is just no reason to excuse him. None.

@chyna: You are perfectly right, I do not know that he was inherently good. I assumed that because most of us are inherently good.

However, he had to be well-trained. He had been with the police department for seven years and he was a bicycle cop earlier in his career. Bicycle cops get close and personal with people they are required to police, that is why I said he was an inherently good cop (but like you say I have zero evidence for that). As for him being possibly a racist, here is a CNN profile on him: https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/jacob-blake-shooting-march-on-washington/h_7d9b0cf03dbc6cff209bee9e786fbb2e. I have copied it here:

Before he was identified as the police officer captured in a viral video in which he shoots a Black man multiple times in the back, Rusten Sheskey pedaled around the lakeside city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, as part of the bike patrol and walked the shopping mall beat during the holidays.

He’d occasionally bring a squad car home from work and turn on the siren for neighborhood kids, one neighbor recalled. An American flag flies outside his home in a middle-class neighborhood.

But five days after Sheskey’s shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake prompted protests and rioting in the typically quiet streets of Kenosha, much remains unknown about the seven-year veteran officer and what prompted him to open fire.

Authorities have declined to provide information on a number of critical questions in the turbulent days since Blake was shot. Most importantly, they have not offered any detailed explanation for why Sheskey used deadly force on Blake as he leaned into a parked car.

Police and city officials also have not responded to public records requests for Sheskey’s history with the department, including any previous uses of force or disciplinary issues. According to a memo from the police chief published on the city’s website, Sheskey received a one-day suspension in 2017 for a violation regarding “safe operation of department vehicles.”

Meanwhile, Blake remains handcuffed to a hospital bed. He was left paralyzed from the waist down in the aftermath of the shooting, which took place in front of three of his young children who were in the car.

Dispatch records indicate that Sheskey and other officers responded to a complaint from a woman saying that Blake was not supposed to be at her residence and would not leave. She also said he had taken her keys and would not give them back.

At a news conference Wednesday, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said officers fired a Taser at Blake before the shooting, but that it was “not successful.” Kaul said Blake admitted possessing a knife and officers recovered one from the floor of the car he was leaning into when Sheskey opened fire. Kaul did not say if Blake had brandished the weapon or what precise reason Sheskey gave for firing multiple shots.

Blake’s family has demanded answers, too, wondering why Sheskey decided to use a gun to resolve the situation. At a news conference on Tuesday, Blake’s family attorney Ben Crump called for the officer’s arrest.

“We are demanding that the prosecutor arrest the officer who shot Jacob Blake. And we are also asking that these officers who violated the policies and their training be terminated immediately,” he said.

Perhaps there is no reason to excuse him. Is there any reason to suspect he is a felon? Surely the truth lies in the middle. Perhaps we’ll find out in court, perhaps we will not.

@crazyguy Read this USA Today article – - – - all of it.

Tropical Willie, I read the entire “fact check” in USA Today. It turns out to be one of the worst fact checks I have seen. Basically, the fact check confirms that:

1. Blake had a knife during the struggle prior to his walk around to the driver side.
2. The cops yelled at him to “drop the knife”.
3. The use of the word “brandishing” is incorrect.

Therefore, the whole thing is false!

Am I missing something?

I was not clear with my answer – I meant “their stated justification” plus they said he has a knife.

YUP !

You assume (you know that means) all things not proved, support your whacked out perspective.

@crazyguy To compare such a tragedy to a golf putt is horribly inappropriate. Do you really not understand this?

The question as written is about any supposed justification for the president’s (incredibly callous) remarks and not for the shooting.

“Incredibly callous,” is exactly right. Unbelievable. The man doesn’t have the brains of a bat, I swear.

@Dutchess_III I’m coming to feel he does have the brains of a bat and knows exactly what he’s doing. Has anybody talked about the failure of our country to address the nearly 200,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the past weeks?. He’s switched the conversation and is hyping up the chaos so the clueless see him s the “law and order” President – no matter that the chaos is on his watch.

We underestimate him at our peril.

@Dutchess_III I have to address two of your comments with this post. First, you said the comparison is “horribly inappropriate”. I have no idea what was going through Trump’s mind when he made the comparison. My speculation is that he was trying to explain why a well-trained person may do something entirely opposed to his/her training. In sports, the term for what happens is “choking”. The only sport Trump is familiar with personally is golf, so voila.

Sometimes a struggling rookie on the PGA Tour may have to make a 3-ft putt to keep his career alive. He may well “choke’ and miss the putt. Cops are trained for months in how to make an arrest in different types of circumstances. However, training can never prepare you for the adrenaline rush that occurs in a real life situation. In this case, the cop had to make a split-second decision: shoot or stand down or something in-between. In hindsight, KNOWING that Blake did not have a gun in the car, the decision the cop made was incorrect. However, just imagine the consequences if there was a gun Blake was reaching for. Suddenly, the situation could evolve into one where the children’s lives are threatened.

In the second comment I want to address you agree with Jeruba’s choice of words. Jeruba called the President’s remarks “incredibly callous”. Given the context I provided above I think the judgment is somewhat rushed, and therefore inappropriate.

Well, you can pick your context, @crazyguy, and so can I. My context is that of a man with a lifelong proclivity for uttering callous remarks and performing callous deeds. This is simply another instance and not a novel occurrence.

Somehow I’ve managed up to now to form judgments without waiting for you to provide the context, so I think I’m okay there.

@crazyguy So if the cop had not “choked” Blake would be dead?

It is demeaning to everyone in the country, especially to the man who is now paralyzed, co compare it to a putt.

And saying that is Trump’s familiar with is golf is not a good choice, since he is a known cheater at golf. People who have played have acknowledge he makes frequent use of his “foot wedge”. The man had a plaque made from a fake tournament and hung it on his locker as the “champion”.

As Chris Rock said, in some professions there is no room for bad apples. And I am coming to believe there are not just bad apples but really bad, racist police forces. Not all, but many. I’ve seen footage of the Police Chief of Kenosha making racist remarks so I don’t believe this was a simple “choke.” Although choke is a good metaphor for what is being done to people of color in this administration and before so maybe it was an apt metaphor!

@flo Sorry, just saw your post above.

Six Democratic mayors from Minnesota’s Iron Range endorsed President Trump’s reelection Friday, signing an open letter that praised the president as a champion for working-class people and slammed Democratic nominee Joseph R. Biden as “out of touch.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/31/6-minnesota-democratic-mayors-endorse-trump-slam-b/

@KNOWITALL Thanks. Stunning. Maybe I’m out of touch.

I don’t care what the exact wording was. Merely mentioning a golf swing in any way is cold and inappropriate.

@Aster How about using a football analogy: a choke on the winning field goal?

Any analogy using a stupid sport to compare to shooting a man 5 times in the back is inappropriate.

@Aster I must remind you that the comparison was not to the actual shooting but choking under pressure. And if “the actual wording” doesn’t matter to you, you will probably be hired by CNN, sight unseen!

@crazyguy You might have noticed that @Aster has 8 great answers. I think it’s because we know she is a trump supporter, yet acknowledged that he messed up.

Make it 10 good answers.

@chyna: Thanks for the heads up, but I think you are being sarcastic, because I see 0 under his/her answer.

She now has 12 GA’s. You must not be looking in the right place.

(13 GA.) Look here Crazy guy

You evilly misstate what the President meant. As if he were joking. I read it and he is saying that in any high-stress job there will be failures and yes, they are failures. Are you trying to increase hate?

Trump never seems to me that he jokes about nothing, and anytime when called out his base go crazy calling the left nothing but hate.
It was an idiotic comparison and yet his base defend him to the death.

Even if he was joking (which he wasn’t because he just stupid @crazyguy) it was in really, really poor taste.
No one is trying to increase hate. We’re trying to fix our government. It’s the most broken and F-upped government on Earth.