A battle over a partial federal shutdown veered into a debate about San Francisco’s street-cleaning efforts Sunday when an offhand jab by President Donald Trump on Twitter sparked an outpouring of online mockery.
In a flurry of early-morning Twitter posts on Sunday, Trump attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., over the shutdown involving his demand for $5.7 billion to fund a border wall with Mexico.
“Nancy Pelosi has behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Democrat,” reads one post by the president. “She is so petrified of the ‘lefties’ in her party that she has lost control…And by the way, clean up the streets in San Francisco, they are disgusting!”
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Conservative media has seized upon recent news stories about efforts to clean up waste left by San Francisco’s large homeless population.
Trump’s tweet had some wondering what Pelosi has to do with the city’s public works department.
“Wouldn’t that be an issue with San Francisco?” asked one Twitter post. “How would the Speaker of the House of Representatives have anything to do with a local city government issue? You really don’t know how government works.”
“Is anyone going to sit him down and explain that @SpeakerPelosi is not in charge of San Francisco’s maintenance department?” asked another tweeter.
Others questioned Trump’s knowledge of the topic: “You’ve never been to San Francisco,” asserted one tweeter, while another said, “You should visit it! Have you ever visited it?”
And still others found the whole situation absurd. “This non sequitur about San Francisco is more evidence of Trump’s dangerous and unbalanced mental state,” wrote one person on Twitter.
Some Twitter posts defended Trump’s characterization of the city, calling the city “America’s toilet” and referring to one entrepreneur’s app that helps users send pictures of street waste to San Francisco’s public waste department.
Meanwhile, Pelosi, responding on Twitter to Trump’s tweet, stuck to the shutdown dispute and did not address the president’s comments regarding San Francisco.
“@realDonaldTrump, 800,000 Americans are going without pay. Re-open the government, let workers get their paychecks and then we can discuss how we can come together to protect the border,” Pelosi wrote.
