Trump Trash Talks Louisville Basketball in Kentucky
Comes after Louisville lost to the University of Michigan in NCAA tournament
Donald Trump appeared to talk trash about the University of Louisville’s loss in the NCAA basketball tournament during his Monday night rally in Louisville.
Trump bragged about the size of his crowd at the Henry Clay Center in before taunting the crowd about the university’s men’s basketball team’s stunner loss on Sunday.
“I mean, I don’t want to say this, we could have been watching a good basketball game tonight,” he told the crowd. “What happened?”
Louisville, which was a number 2 seed in the Midwest Regional, lost to number 7th-seeded University of Michigan in a surprise loss that busted numerous brackets, including the one of Senate Majority Leader and Louisville alum Sen. Mitch McConnell, who was at Trump’s rally.
McConnell, who went to Louisville for his undergraduate degree and the University of Kentucky for his law degree, picked Louisville to face Kentucky in the Final Four.
Though the usually realistic Senate Majority Leader possibly let school pride overshadow good judgment, as he had Louisville and Kentucky, the 2 seed in the South regional, beating the University of Kansas and the University of North Carolina, both number 1 seeds.
Later on in the evening, Trump told the crowd “You just worry about your basketball team, I’ll take care of the rest.”
“You just worry about your basketball team — I’ll take care of the rest,” Pres. Trump tells supporters in Kentucky https://t.co/iXaifz5537 pic.twitter.com/QnRkL52tgw
— CBS News (@CBSNews) March 21, 2017
It is unclear if Trump was again taunting Louisville fans or he was telling them to worry about the University of Kentucky, which is based in Lexington and is Louisville’s intra-state rival.
Current Louisville head coach Rick Pitino is a former Kentucky coach and won an NCAA championship there in 1996 before winning a championship at Louisville in 2013.
The rivalry is so vicious that in December a fight broke out between Lousiville and Kentucky fans. In 2012, fans from the two schools fought at a dialysis center. Really, it did).
Back in 2014, McConnell landed in a basketball controversy of his own when he included footage of Duke University winning the NCAA championship in a campaign advertisement.
Had Louisville won Sunday, they would have played Thursday, not Monday.