CNN sports correspondent Don Riddell may have been reporting from snow-covered D.C. on Friday’s The Situation Room, but his hot take about the upcoming World Cup could have thawed the wintry weather. According to Riddell, Trump’s America—specifically, ICE operations—is comparable to human rights abuses in the two previous World Cup hosts of Russia and Qatar.
Co-host Pamela Brown set Riddell up by giving credence to the idea that “immigration advocates” who allege similar sentiments should be taken seriously, “I want to bring you back in, Don, because there have been these allegations, as we know, of human rights abuses that have plagued World Cup hosts in the past. But now some immigrant advocates say that they're worried about detentions and deportations during the tournament in the U.S. You've covered so many of these World Cups before. What more do you know about that?”
Riddell wasted no time getting to his dumb analogy, “You know, it's fascinating. I've been at CNN 23 years, so I've been a part of all the World Cups that have happened in that time. And a lot of the build up to the FIFA World Cup in Russia in 2018 and then again in Qatar in 2022 four years later, was about the human rights abuses, and it would have been hard to imagine back then that we would be talking about similar things about a World Cup hosted by the United States, but that is where we are now, and a lot of people have a lot of concerns.”
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