This week, Charles Barkley made headlines with a pretty stern warning to Black people - if he meets anyone wearing a picture of Donald Trump’s mugshot, they should be prepared to meet his fist.
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“First of all, I’m just gonna say this, if I see a Black person walking around with a Trump mug shot, I’m gonna punch him in the face,” Barkley told his co-host, Gayle King, on the March 5 episode of CNN’s “King Charles.”
Barkley’s words got a lot of people talking. He picked up a few new fans who were all in favor of his threat of a beat down.
“You know, I used to not like CB all that much. But this… this makes me LOVE HIM!💙” said @TammB.
But others suggested he keep his opinions on politics to himself.
“If you take political advice from Charles Barkley, you have serious mental issues,” said @WillyGG.
So King gave Barkley a chance to respond to the online chatter on their March 7 “King Charles” episode. And while he walked back the threat of violence, Sir Charles was not shy about what he thinks about Black people who are riding with the former president.
“First of all, obviously, I’m not going to go around punching random strangers in the face. Secondly, people can vote for who they want to. The point I was making was when Donald Trump compares his plight with that of the Black person, that is what I had a problem with,” he said.
“Now, I do want to say this. I want to make it perfectly clear, if you’re a Black person and you’re wearing a Donald Trump mugshot, you are a freakin’ idiot,’ he added.
King and Barkley were discussing Trump’s comments to a group of Black conservatives suggesting his problems with the law are a part of his appeal to the Black community.
“I got indicted for nothing, for something that is nothing. They were doing it because it’s election interference and then I got indicted a second time, and a third time and a fourth time. And a lot of people said that that’s why the Black people like me because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against,” Trump said while addressing the Black Conservative Federation in South Carolina right before the state’s Republican primary.
Although the former president and current Republican presidential candidate is juggling four criminal cases, he’s firmly denied his role in any misdeeds. And now, he’s trying to compare his first world problems with the racial disparities in the criminal justice system which have led Black people accounting for 53 percent of people in the country who were falsely convicted of a serious crime and then freed after serving at least part of their sentence, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
“The mug shot, we’ve all seen the mug shot, and you know who embraced it more than anybody else? The Black population. It’s incredible. You see Black people walking around with my mug shot, you know they do shirts,” Trump said.
The 61-year-old sports analyst told Gayle King he found Trump’s remarks offensive and an unfair comparison to the struggles Black people have faced in America.
“If I was at that [conference], I would have got up and walked out. That was an insult to all Black people,” Barkley said.
And he wants Trump to know that if he’s looking for compassion, he should look elsewhere.
“I don’t like to speak for all Black people, but I’m going to right now. We don’t feel sympathetic to his plight,” Barkley said.
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