Trump Targets San Francisco Again Amid O'Reilly Special

President Trump used a Cabinet meeting Thursday to veer into familiar territory, expressing concern about San Francisco’s recovery while suggesting the city is moving too slowly toward improvement. The comments came the same day Bill O’Reilly aired a prime-time special on NewsNation titled “The Decline and Fall of San Francisco,” and the timing is hard to ignore.

Trump has made San Francisco a recurring target, and the pattern here fits. O’Reilly’s special, which appears to have been assembled around footage shot during Super Bowl weekend in February, aired Thursday evening. Trump, by most accounts a devoted consumer of cable and streaming news, may well have gotten a preview through morning clips before his Cabinet meeting. The viral footage of a scuffle involving Mayor Daniel Lurie’s security detail in the Tenderloin three weeks ago also likely crossed Trump’s feed at some point.

“What a great city was. A great city. Could quickly become a great city again. But, you know, they’re going very slowly,” Trump said, according to KTVU. He also mentioned that friends in San Francisco had asked him to give Lurie a chance, and said he would. “He’s trying. He’s doing okay. But we could do much better.”

Trump then pivoted to immigration enforcement, signaling that San Francisco would join Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles as targets for increased federal action.

Mayor Lurie responded quickly. “In San Francisco, crime is down 30%, encampments are at record lows, and our city is on the rise. Public safety is my number one priority, and we are going to stay laser focused on keeping our streets safe and clean,” his statement read.

O’Reilly’s special, for its part, is a mixed bag. He praises Lurie, saying the new mayor has “dialed back some of the progressive nonsense, and by some metrics, things are getting better.” But he quickly follows that with footage of the Tenderloin confrontation, framing it as an “attack” on the mayor’s motorcade. “I mean, come on!” O’Reilly says in the clip.

The special also includes a claim that the city tried to clean itself up by “herding the homeless into overnight shelters where they could not be seen.” That framing bumps hard against the reality that San Francisco has chronically insufficient shelter capacity, a problem the city has struggled with for years and continues to grapple with now.

There is something almost reflexive about this cycle. San Francisco as a symbol of liberal urban failure has been a fixture of conservative media for decades. The city’s very real struggles with homelessness, drug addiction, and street conditions peaked as a national media obsession roughly two to three years ago, and O’Reilly’s special arrives well after that wave crested. Shooting a TV special during Super Bowl weekend and cutting it into a prime-time warning about urban decay is a well-worn playbook.

What makes this iteration different is that Lurie, a Democrat who took office in January 2025 on an explicit public safety platform, has put real distance between himself and the progressive governance model that drew so much of the criticism. The 30% crime reduction figure in his statement is not a number his office invented for a press release. It reflects measurable shifts that even skeptics have acknowledged, however cautiously.

Trump’s framing, that things are improving but “going very slowly,” is actually a softer line than he typically takes with American cities he wants to make examples of. That softness probably reflects both Lurie’s positioning as someone willing to govern differently and the political reality that SF’s downtown recovery has visible momentum.

None of that changes the underlying dynamic. A president with documented television-driven attention patterns, a cable host with a special that aired on a slow Thursday in late March, a viral clip from the Tenderloin, and a Cabinet meeting that suddenly includes remarks about San Francisco. The cause-and-effect chain does not require much investigation.

Lurie, for his part, seems to understand the game. He kept his response short, led with numbers, and did not take the bait.