Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made a stop in “the once great city” of San Francisco, a visit that he claimed was filled with drugs and “riff raff.”
While that might sound like a fun time to some, it wasn’t up the Floridian’s alley.
“We came in here and we saw people defecating on the street, we saw people using heroin, we saw people smoking crack cocaine,” DeSantis said in a video posted Tuesday. “And you look around, the city is not vibrant anymore.”
The visit followed a campaign stop by the 2024 presidential hopeful in Sacramento, where he spoke at a “roundtable breakfast” at Del Paso Country Club on Monday.
The stop comes just a few weeks after DeSantis’ administration flew 36 migrants to the California capital, an act that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said may amount to “kidnapping.”
The DeSantis campaign has sought to contrast DeSantis to Newsom, amid continued murmurs that the California governor is considering launching a 2024 bid—though he has repeatedly sworn off the idea of primarying President Joe Biden.
Last week, DeSantis challenged Newsom to “stop pussyfooting around” about 2024. “Are you gonna throw your hat in the ring and challenge [Biden] … or are you just gonna sit on the sidelines and chirp?”
In a separate ad shared to social media on Monday, the DeSantis campaign wrote that “California’s liberal governance is a disaster,” and that DeSantis’ “conservative policies have Florida thriving, and would do so for the nation.”
DeSantis continued to criticize California’s “leftist policies” during Tuesday’s San Francisco video, saying “these policies have caused people to flee this area.”
“They don’t prosecute criminals like they do in most parts of the country, and the wreckage has really, really been sad to see,” he continued. “And so I’ve seen so many businesses boarded up, I’ve seen so much riff raff just running around and it just shows you these policies matter, leadership matters.”
DeSantis later jabbed: “No wonder why we’ve had so many people move from San Francisco to Florida over the last few years.”
While the tweet largely garnered praise from DeSantis supporters in the replies, some people argued the Florida governor has other things to worry about in his state first.
“The hilarious part about this video is everything he is complaining about here is also taking place within about a two mile radius of Florida’s Governor’s Mansion,” tweeted one user.
“Go deal with Florida,” wrote another.
A third user tweeted that DeSantis had “incredible chutzpah to assert that extreme poverty” is caused by leftist policies. “He’s literally in the mecca of tech capitalism.”
