Gavin Newsom trolled Trump ally Kevin O’Leary after the Shark Tank star claimed vast swaths of San Francisco and downtown Los Angeles were “war zones.”
MAGA tycoon O’Leary defended Donald Trump’s threat to deploy thousands of National Guard troops to Democrat-run cities like Chicago, under the pretense of clamping down on violent crime.
“We haven’t even mentioned war zones like downtown San Francisco, or Hollywood or L.A.,” the businessman told CNN’s NewsNight host Abby Phillip. “They are war zones. You can’t walk outside at night, period.
“I don’t give a damn if it’s the Army, the National Guard, the FBI. I couldn’t care less,” he said, adding, “and I can guarantee you 80, 90, 100 percent of the people there don’t care either. They just want to walk outside.”
His remarks caught the attention of California governor and Trump’s current nemesis-in-chief Gavin Newsom, who in June became the first victim of the president’s domestic military operations, when the administration sent 5,000 troops to L.A. to crack down on immigration protests.
Responding to O’Leary’s remarks in a post on X, Newsom shared two headlines from the Los Angeles Times and ABC7, both of which showed that homicide rates in each city had plummeted to their lowest rates in more than 60 years.
Just 33 homicides were reported in San Francisco by the end of 2024, dropping 34 percent from the year before to the lowest rate since the early 1960s—a decline city officials say is due to a greater effort on crime prevention and community support.
“This wasn’t an accident. This was very strategic,” police chief Bill Scott said at the time. “You can’t argue with the outcomes.”
Los Angeles, meanwhile, has seen murder rates drop by 20 percent since January, before the National Guard was called in to occupy the city.
Contrary to the administration’s claims, homicide rates have dropped dramatically all across the country since the start of the decade.
Criminology expert Jeff Asher has even deemed the current period “the great murder decline,” which he claims is due to “strong investment in communities from private and public sources after the shock of the pandemic.”
Newsom previously dismissed the president’s mobilization of troops to L.A. as “political theater” and said the president was “using service members as props in the federal government’s propaganda machine.”
The Daily Beast has contacted O’Leary for further comment.
