Scott Presler’s Trump-Inspired City Cleanup Movement Finds Horror on the Streets of San Francisco

Matt Perdie / Breitbart News

Scott Presler told Breitbart News that President Donald Trump’s tweets about the trash-filled and rat-infested streets in Baltimore inspired him to help clean up the city and, since then, many other American cities, including San Francisco, where Presler said he was shocked by the conditions on that city’s streets.

Trump’s tweets about Baltimore angered the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), who represented the city, but Presler reacted differently.

“Everybody was pointing the finger but nobody was doing anything,” said Pressler, who is a loyal Trump supporter.

“I said, okay, I’m going to send out a tweet saying I’m going to the city of Baltimore even if it’s me standing on a street corner picking up trash,” Presler said.

“From that we had more than 170 volunteers descending on the city of Baltimore and we picked up 12 tons of trash in 12 hours in one day,” Pressler said.

Breitbart News spoke with Presler at the recent American Conservative Union’s 2020 CPAC convention in Oxon Hill, Maryland, about why he started a movement that has made fans and volunteers of the almost half a million people who follow him on Twitter.

Since his first cleanup in Baltimore in August of 2019, Presler and his volunteers and fellow Trump supporters collected 105 tons of trash in Austin, Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles before the New Year arrived.

This year, so far, he has also cleaned up in Portland, Oregon, but it was his trip to San Francisco that put a new spotlight on the blight in one of America’s once shining cities.

“You saw some horrible things in San Francisco,” Breitbart News asked Pressler. “Can you share what you saw, because it wasn’t just coke bottles and water bottles.”

“I can just tell you I have been to some of America’s most dirtiest and dangerous cities — I’ve been to Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco — San Francisco was the only city where you had to watch your step because of human excrement,” Presler said.

“You know you hear things about the ‘poop map,’ and you hear things about the city — it’s hard to believe because so many things are hyperbole,” Pressler said. “I’m here to tell you having walked the streets it’s real, it’s factual.”

He witnessed people passed out on sidewalks surrounded by trash and used needle syringes.

“It was really sad,” Presler said.

Presler plans more cleanups on March 14 in Pittsburgh and in Philadelphia on April 4. His crew will visit Detroit on May 2 and he also hopes to host a cleanup during the Democrat nominating conference in July.

“Sometimes, before pointing the finger at someone else, you have to point it back at yourself and ask, ‘What are YOU doing to help?’” Pressler told Breitbart News. 

“I’m not going to wait for the government to fix the problem,” Presler said. “I’m going to do it myself and vote out those who aren’t helping our cities.”

And now, Presler has added another date for cleaning up: This Sunday in Nashville, Tennessee.

“As soon as I heard about the tornadoes in Nashville, I felt a responsibility to help,” Presler said. “What do all of these followers, likes, and retweets on Twitter mean if I don’t use my platform for good?”

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