President Donald Trump defended his intervention to reverse the Red Card shown to USA striker Folarin Balogun by Brazilian referee Raphael Claus.
Transcript:
Trump: So, I saw the play, and I'm a person that loves sports and was a good athlete, and I understand sports really well, really well. And that wasn't a foul. That wasn't even an infraction. That was two guys running full speed that happened to crash into each other. Like, you can't take your foot and properly place it on somebody else's foot when you're going—no, these were two great athletes that got tangled up.
And this referee who is a little bit suspect, if you check his, if you check his past. I don't want to say that, because I don't like to create controversy. But, but, very suspect. Uh, if you'd like, I'll provide you with the past. He made a call that nobody could believe. You know, even people on the other side, they said, "Oh, we got lucky. Wow, that's..."
And it's very interesting. They say they don't show them in slow motion. And I never realized that, I never heard that before. That they're not allowed to review in slow motion because it's so different. Because you'll take one little quarter of a second and you'll see that a hand is touching a neck, or you'll see something. Whereas when you see it in fast motion, it it will look like two guys collided, which is really what happened. They got uh sort of entangled. He didn't do anything wrong, and he's our best player or one of our best players. A very vital player.
And he gave him a red card. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't think it meant much. Then I started hearing that that means he can't play in the next game, at least in the next game. I said, "Boy, that's a big..." You know, if it happened to another player, it would have been unfair. But when they take your best player, or just about—they have some great players, but—and they say you can't play, that's very unfair. That's, you know, it's one thing to penalize somebody for the game, but how do you penalize them for a game that hasn't been played yet? It's very unfair. You can't do that.
So, uh yes, I asked for a review by FIFA. I spoke to a man who's highly respected and, by the way, whose level of respect has gone up tenfold. And he was good before this started, but, you know, he really pushed it in this country. I'm the one that got them to do it. It was not Biden. Biden was asleep. I got them to do it. In fact, it was very sad because I got them to do it, and if the progression was normal, I would have been retired. Now the Democrats are saying, "Man, we should have just let him have his four years. We would have had him—we would have had him gone." But I said, "You know, the sad thing is I got the Olympics, and I got the World Cup."
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