Francis Ngannou, who is getting set to take on UFC Heavyweight Champion Stipe Miocic at UFC 220 in Boston on Saturday, slammed President Donald Trump as a “the shame for America” for his purported comments about “sh**hole nations.”
The UFC fighter was asked by an MMA reporter if he had heard of Trump’s thus far unsubstantiated comments about foreign nations. The fighter said he had heard of the comments and he was offended by them, BJPenn reported.
“All those people that [Donald Trump] was talking about is people like us. It’s kind of difficult to accept a thing like that. To hear a thing like that,” Ngannou said after the reporter pressed him on the issue.
“For myself, the goal for me was to lift [up] my country and see someone who just wants to break that dream, that hope that people are following,” the French Cameroon-born fighter continued.
“This guy is like a shame for America,” Ngannou said. “America was built from immigration. America is the country that the poor people of the world look to like a model. Not expecting America to give them something, but just to look at them like an example.”
Ngannou then went on to praise Barack Obama saying, “This country has been doing well with a great president like the last one Barack Obama — like Martin Luther King — people like that who really helped to work for that.”
The top fighter added, “Then today, we have some guy like Donald Trump who come and break all that down. So, it’s just a shame.”
The fighter continued insisting that he knows about being an immigrant because he is one. But he also exclaimed that immigrants “don’t leave their country because they want to leave their country.”
He added that immigrants who come to the U.S. or other countries don’t love their adopted nations.
“They don’t leave their country because they love another country better than their country. They leave their country because they don’t have a choice. Because they are looking to opportunity, looking for change,” he said.
“They want change things for their family,” Ngannou concluded. “They don’t want their kids to live in the same situation that they did. They want to give the chance for their kids to have what they didn’t have in their life. They want to sacrifice themselves for their family.”
One might ask Ngannou why he’d continue to love a country that is so bad he feels it necessary to leave and take his whole family with him, and why he can’t love an adopted country that gives him the opportunity to become rich and famous?
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
