President Donald Trump helped return rapper A$AP Rocky to the United States from Sweden, but the associates who helped get the president involved are upset the rapper did not acknowledge the work on behalf of the White House, according to Yahoo! News.
"All he had to do was do a two-minute call to say, 'thank you,'" Pastor Darrell Scott, who served on the president's transition team and assists on African American issues, told Yahoo! "Rocky hasn't even called us and said, 'Hey, man, thank you guys. I appreciate it,' in private. Just in private."
Scott and Kareem Lanier, a co-chairman of the Urban Revitalization Coalition, made only one request to A$AP Rocky's manager John Ehmann in exchange to escalate the rapper's legal troubles up to the president, per the report: They wanted acknowledgment from the rapper.
"I was like, man, 'you ungrateful motherf–ers, you,'" Lanier told Yahoo! of a conversation with a lawyer for A$AP Rocky after his release. "'I can't believe you. . . . We didn't ask you guys for nothing other than for you guys to be grateful. We just want you guys to be appreciative and say, thank you.'"
Scott added to Yahoo! that Ehmann "started making all these excuses" for the rapper, saying he was busy, was traveling, or needed rest.
"One of the problems that we have as a culture — and I'm talking about black Americans — is herd mentality," Lanier told Yahoo! "Right now it's popular for those guys to bash President Trump."
Lanier added, though, President Trump was not helping out the rapper to merely appease or appeal to black voters.
"He won the election with 8% of the black vote," Lanier told Yahoo! "He doesn't need black voters or need A$AP Rocky to get black voters.
"He did this because it was the right thing to do."
President Trump has made it a priority in his administration to reduce the prison population and he has signed a comprehensive criminal-justice reform bill.
"The president is so pro-criminal justice reform, sentencing reform . . . we knew this would be something that would be right up his wheelhouse," Lanier told Yahoo! about bringing A$AP Rocky circumstance to the president's attention.
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