With the White House issuing a torrent of executive orders and taking a buzzsaw to the federal bureaucracy, a new class of anti-Trump leaders is emerging from San Francisco and Sacramento who intend to stop — as much as they possibly can — the president’s blitzkrieg.
But this slate of anti-Trumpers lives and breathes in a different universe from those of eight years ago. The Pussyhat marches that defined Democratic opposition in the late 2010s are nowhere to be seen. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Trump’s chief foil in his first term, has been quiet. And big-city mayors—including SF’s Daniel Lurie and Los Angeles’ Karen Bass — have, for now, been reluctant to be a bulwark against the president.
“Our current mayor doesn’t seem the type of person to fill the vacuum,” said San Francisco State University politics professor Jason McDaniel. “Not that he won’t, but I don’t think that’s his natural field.”
This has left an opening for local Democrats to become the face of San Francisco’s anti-Trump movement. Four players are filling the void: City Attorney David Chiu, Supervisor Jackie Fielder, state Sen. Scott Wiener, and Attorney General Rob Bonta.
‘This moment is existential’
Chiu, arguably San Francisco’s anti-Trumper-in-chief, fought back during the president’s first term as a member of the state Assembly.
The office Chiu now leads has previously filed legal challenges against Trump during his first administration on issues such as federal funding, healthcare, and immigration.
Over the last month, Chiu has taken more swings at the White House. The hardest came in early February when he and Santa Clara County jointly filed a lawsuit against the president’s immigration policies. The lawsuit specifically challenges an executive order threatening federal funding for sanctuary cities and Department of Justice directives seeking to criminally punish local and state officials who don’t comply with the administration’s immigration plans.
“This moment is existential for our democracy,” Chiu told The Standard, “and our civil society. Nothing matters beyond how we meet this moment.” The city attorney said he’s been consumed by the work, calculating that he has slept four hours a night over the last month: “I have a Fitbit that tells me how much sleep I am not getting.”
Team Sacramento
San Francisco is also a party to a lawsuit that Bonta filed against Trump just one day after the inauguration which seeks to prevent the president from overturning birthright citizenship. The topic is close to home: The late-1800s U.S. Supreme Court case affirming birthright citizenship is based on a San Francisco man’s experience with immigration officials.
In addition to birthright citizenship, Bonta is jumping into legal battles over the president’s federal funding freeze, Elon Musk’s “unlawful exercise of power,” and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s “improper access to this sensitive information,” and cuts to research institutions.
“[Trump] thinks he’s the CEO of a corporation called America,” Bonta told The Standard. “And he can’t [be]. Because we have a Constitution.”
‘In the crosshairs’
Lacking legal powers, some local and state officials are instead turning up their rhetoric on the chief executive.
On the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Fielder has been one of the most outspoken against the president.
Her tack shouldn’t surprise voters: She comes from the progressive bloc of the Democratic Party and oversees a largely Latino district that may be disproportionately affected by the immigration crackdown coming from the White House.
One of her first moves as supervisor was a resolution affirming San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city, a legally nonbinding policy statement that served as symbolic resistance against the president’s immigration stance. Fielder has also been vocal about reported Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the city and called a man seen wearing an ICE jacket in a taqueria “a terrorist.”
“I’m Native American, I’m a woman, I’m queer,” she said. “I’m in the crosshairs of this administration.”
While Fielder has taken on immigration in the city, Wiener has become the Bay Area’s leading voice on LGBTQ issues in the age of Trump. Days before the inauguration, the state senator proposed a bill that would seal certain court records for transgender Californians.
At a press conference in late January, attended by Chiu and Fielder, Wiener lambasted the president’s executive order directing the U.S. government to recognize only two genders.
“They’re trying to scare everyone,” Wiener said in an interview. “It is important for people and leaders in California to name what they’re doing. They’re setting up an authoritarian state.”
Whether the anti-Trump advocacy is politically advantageous for Chiu, Bonta, Fielder, and Wiener remains to be seen.
It’s popular in San Francisco to oppose Trump, said Todd David, political director for moderate-leaning group Abundant SF and a former Wiener aide, but it could become a problem if it comes at the expense of combatting local quality-of-life issues.
“If a local elected is going to take a position on a national issue that seems to be in contrast to addressing [San Francisco’s] street disorder … I think that today feels politically risky to me,” said David.
But Keally McBride, a political professor at the University of San Francisco, feels certain that elected officials are in a safe place to go after the president.
“Maybe I’m giving them too much credit,” she said, but “it isn’t about the next election for them. It really is about the status of the law in this country. … I don’t think it’ll come back to haunt them.”