‘An Act of Love’: Pro-Trump Activist Cleans up 50 Tons of Trash in Los Angeles

Conservative activist Scott Presler after a street cleanup event in Baltimore, Md., on Aug. 5, 2019. Courtesy of Scott Presler

Conservative activist Scott Presler has led another massive clean up operation, this time in Los Angeles, following his other successful cleanup efforts in cities around the country.

Presler, who started clean-up effort across the country following President Donald Trump’s Twitter posts that shined a light the squalid conditions in West Baltimore, headed to a homeless camp in the California city on Sept. 21 and removed 50 tons of trash, the activist said.

Presler documented the efforts of over 200 volunteers in a series of Twitter posts, which started after 7 a.m. according to his post. He said it took them 9 hours to finish the job.

“It’s almost 9 a.m. & we’re removing waste from a homeless camp in Los Angeles,” Presler wrote. “Why is an outsider from Northern Virginia here & not California elected leadership?”

Presler posted updates periodically throughout the day on their progress, writing on Twitter: “We’re making incredible progress. This is an act of love.”

When the group was done, Presler wrote that the Los Angeles clean up was “one of the proudest moments of my life” and that he will “never forget the day we cleaned up a homeless camp in LA.”

The clean up comes after Trump said on Sept. 17 that he cannot let California cities “destroy themselves” by failing to adequately deal with the homelessness situation.

“We can’t let Los Angeles, San Francisco, and numerous other cities destroy themselves by allowing what’s happening,” he told reporters en route to San Francisco, reported Fox News.

“We have people living in our … best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings ... where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige,” Trump continued. “In many cases, they came from other countries and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden they have tents. Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And they want to leave. And the people of San Francisco are fed up, and the people of Los Angeles are fed up.”

In a previous interview with Epoch Times, Presler explained how he came to oversee volunteers in his clean up efforts, which started in Baltimore.

“My folks always told me, ‘Don’t ever offer a problem without offering a solution,’” he said, talking about his Baltimore clean up.

“I’m so tired of people saying, ‘We should do this, we should do that’ … I was just like, ‘I’ve had it. I’m going to go to Baltimore, even if it’s just me on a street corner picking up trash,’” he said.

During his first Baltimore clean up, Presler led 200 volunteers along the streets of northwest Baltimore on Aug. 5 to clean up trash and weeds. The city has struggled with trash in its streets for years and its shrinking population has left some 16,000 uninhabitable empty houses. Many of the homes are in an unsafe condition, and the city owns many of them, but only comes once a year to clean up the alleys, Presler previously told Epoch Times.

The idea came after Trump chided Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) for filthy conditions in his district, which includes downtown and West Baltimore.

Epoch Times reporter Petr Svab contributed to this report.