United States president Donald Trump has implied he regrets intervening to get 3 UCLA basketball athletes released from China after they were caught shoplifting designer glasses in the powerful Eastern country.
The three freshmen basketballers, Cody Riley, Li Angelo, and Jalen Hill apologized publicly and thanked President Donald Trump for his diplomatic intervention with Chinese President Xi Jinping which saw the athletes back on American soil in record time.
However the father of one of the athletes, Lavar Ball has downplayed President Donald Trump’s role in aiding his son and the other athlete’s during their ordeal.
Who?” Ball said to ESPN. “What was (Trump) over there for? Don’t tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out.”
Trump boasted via Twitter that the players were facing 10 years in prison before he spoke with Xi Jinping. LaVar Ball previously downplayed the charges, saying it “ain’t that big of a deal.”
“As long as my boy’s back here, I’m fine,” 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 L.A. 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.
“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.”
His comments sparked the ire of the President who tweeted maybe he should have left them in jail.
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