SAN FRANCISCO (KRONA) – San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has won praise for his efforts to defuse a situation in which federal immigration agents, and possibly troops, appeared ready to intervene in the city. But while President Donald Trump said Mayor Lowry “very nicely” asked him to give the city a chance, the president’s comments Thursday afternoon implied that it was the city’s billionaire tech CEOs — not the city’s elected mayor — who influenced him to rescind the increase.
“You know, you may have heard, we were going to do a big raise in San Francisco, but I got a great call from some great people, some of my friends, very successful people. Mark, who everyone knows, and Jensen, everyone knows Jensen,” Trump said, referring to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his counterpart at Nvidia, Jensen Huang.
“And others called me from San Francisco. They said we’re working very hard with the mayor and we’re making progress. Would you please wait until you can postpone the surge?” Trump continued, saying that he made four or five calls to people he knew in San Francisco.
City leaders had been preparing for federal intervention in the city following comments Benioff made about his desire to deploy the National Guard in the city to the New York Times in the week before his company’s annual Dreamforce conference.
“We’re going to San Francisco. The difference is, I think they want us in San Francisco,” Trump told Fox News several days after Benioff made his remarks.
After much fallout, including billionaire venture capitalist Ron Conway’s public resignation from Salesforce’s board of directors, Benioff later backtracked and apologized for his comments. In his comments Thursday, Trump appeared to credit Benioff and fellow tech executives for his decision to halt the increase.
“Some of the smartest business leaders and they work very well with the police department to do a good job,” Trump said. “So, we’re stopping this surge, everyone. We’ll let them see if they can do it.”
After taking a mostly hostile stance toward him in his first term, several leading tech CEOs, in the Bay Area and elsewhere, have loudly expressed their support for Trump in his second term. Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and most notably Elon Musk have all supported Trump to some extent, and appear to have gained some influence with him.
It may also not have escaped Trump that the rise in technology stocks, fueled largely by San Francisco’s emerging artificial intelligence industry, has served as a leading light in an economy that has been hobbled by slow job growth and high inflation.
Now, while plans for a San Francisco “surge” appear to be at least on hold, if not canceled outright, Trump appears to be turning his attention elsewhere.
Trump said San Francisco “has the potential, very quickly, to become a great city again, and these are the companies that are there that are all working, and these are the people who asked me: ‘Can you get rid of the surge?’ And let’s see how it works. And we’ll do it, if we need to, we’ll do it. “But we may not need that, and we will focus on other places like Chicago.”