During a Wednesday news conference at the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump said he is considering sending the National Guard to San Francisco, making it the next major city to potentially be targeted in his string of deployments.
“I’m going to be strongly recommending, at the request of government officials, which is always nice, that you start looking at San Francisco. I think we can make San Francisco, as one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and now it’s a mess. And we have great support in San Francisco,” Trump said at the conference, which also included other members of his administration and FBI Director Kash Patel.
State and local officials quickly pushed back on Trump’s proposal. Rafael Mandelman, president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, told SFGATE he would be “surprised” if any local official asked for the National Guard.
“I cannot imagine what good could come from deploying military troops on San Francisco’s streets, and I can imagine a lot of harm,” Mandelman said.
Though the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom did not immediately respond to SFGATE’s request for comment or clarification as to which officials requested the troops, Newsom’s press office and the governor himself responded to the president with similar posts on X.
“TRUMP: San Francisco was a great city 15 years ago,” the post from Newsom’s account read. “ME: Why, thank you!”
Trump has previously referred to San Francisco as being “the best city in the country” 15 years ago, a time when Newsom was the city’s mayor and Kamala Harris was the district attorney.
Other local officials reacted strongly on social media, characterizing the move as dangerous.
In a post on X, state Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, called Trump’s claim about government officials requesting the troops a “lie.”
“We don’t need Trump’s authoritarian crackdown in our city. Bottom line: Stay the hell out of San Francisco,” he said in the post.
Trump’s comments came after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised the idea of sending the National Guard to the city.
In a Friday interview with the New York Times, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who has previously praised the state of downtown, said he “fully” supports Trump’s plan. But on Sunday, just before the company’s Dreamforce conference opened, Benioff tried to clarify his position, saying that San Francisco “needs more resources to keep San Franciscans safe year-round.”
Benioff’s comments triggered responses from city officials.
In a Tuesday news conference, SF Mayor Daniel Lurie did not mention Trump or Benioff by name, but he pointed to decreasing crime: down 40% in Union Square and 30% across the city as a whole. And in the same news conference, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins disagreed with the troops’ potential intervention.
“To see tear gas and all the things that are happening – we don’t want that chaos here,” Jenkins said, referring to other cities where Trump has already sent troops. “Our job is to maintain order, and the public trusts us to get that job done.”
A Wednesday news release from Newsom’s office also referenced San Francisco’s decline in crime and low homicide rates throughout California. According to his office, California’s 2025 homicide rate is the second-lowest since 1966.
Over the past several months, Trump has deployed troops to Democratic-led cities such as Los Angeles, Portland, Memphis, Chicago and Washington, D.C., “to make them essentially crime-free,” the president has said.
Newsom’s office has accused Trump of illegally sending California troops to Oregon and threatened to sue the administration. On Wednesday, a court order was extended that would block Trump’s attempts to send the troops to Oregon.
A federal judge also sided with Newsom’s office in September, after Newsom claimed that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles earlier this year was illegal.
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This article originally published at Trump targets San Francisco, ‘strongly’ recommending National Guard deployment.