President Donald Trump has affirmed that it’s a matter of when, not if, the National Guard will be in San Francisco.
“San Francisco was truly one of the great cities of the world, and then 15 years ago it went wrong — it went woke,” he said in an interview with Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo (opens in new tab), which aired Sunday morning. “We are gonna go to San Francisco, and we are going to make it great.”
Trump claimed that residents of SF, unlike in Chicago, where troops have already been deployed, “want” the National Guard because of liberal policies.
“If I were a Democrat, I would say, ‘Come right in,’” Trump said in the interview. “What do you have to lose?”
The comments come after two weeks of fraught public discourse among locals on whether deploying troops in San Francisco was legal or necessary. They also come months after Trump first suggested troops could come to SF — a line he’s since repeated on multiple occasions.
Ahead of his annual Dreamforce conference, Salesforce founder and fourth-generation San Franciscan Marc Benioff encouraged Trump to send in troops so long as they could act as cops, only to back away from that position once the conference concluded without safety threats. Other major players in the tech scene, like Elon Musk and David Sacks, who have both closely advised the president, endorsed Benioff’s original statements.
Nearly all local politicians, including House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (opens in new tab), pushed back. Last week, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she “won’t hesitate (opens in new tab)” to press charges against federal troops if they break local laws while stationed here. Mayor Daniel Lurie scrapped an event (opens in new tab) he planned to hold with Benioff after the billionaire’s comments, and said he trusts local law enforcement to keep the city safe.
Troops have been here before
To justify deploying federal troops, Trump would have to show that the city’s open-air drug markets pose enough of a threat, or that there’s a risk of violent rebellion against the government.
With crime down 30% since last year (opens in new tab) and with only peaceful protests on the streets, including Saturday’s No Kings March, both would be tough to prove in court.
In his interview Sunday, however, the president seemed confident he could make a case.
“I can use the Insurrection Act,” he told the Fox News anchor. “That’s unquestioned power.”
Troops have been sent to San Francisco before — during natural disasters and times of intense unrest — but never over the objections of the California governor and so many local leaders. Each time the troops came, it was in the immediate aftermath of a significant event that caused chaos in the city. These events can be used to understand the history of this city, which is long and storied.
In 1877, the California State Militia was called upon to control (opens in new tab) riots by the city’s majority Irish population against Chinese immigrants during what is known as the “Long Depression” of the 1870s.
After the first transcontinental railroad was built, Chinese workers in San Francisco were working for lower rates than their Irish counterparts. Across the city, which had around 200,000 residents at the time, 20% of all men in the city were unemployed. Right now, 4.3% of San Franciscans are jobless, and the city hasn’t seen anything close to a protest movement that resulted in four deaths.
Then there was April 18, 1906, the day the city was turned on its head by a historic earthquake. In the immediate aftermath of the natural disaster that destroyed 80% of the city and killed 3,000, when fires were still blazing, troops stationed in the Presidio were deployed to San Francisco. In the words of then-Mayor Eugene Schmitz (opens in new tab), the troops had been ordered to “KILL any and all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime.”
Another deployment was spurred by “Bloody Thursday,” which took place on July 5, 1934, during the West Coast waterfront strike. Longshoremen on every U.S. West Coast port had walked out, and then-California Gov. Frank Merriam called on the state National Guard to patrol the waterfront during protests. That unrest included tear gas, bullets, and two dead men.
Organizers only got more riled up from “Bloody Thursday (opens in new tab)” and led a general strike that essentially shut down the state’s ports. Then-Mayor Angelo Rossi declared a state of emergency; a settlement was reached after four days.
On Sept. 27, 1966 (opens in new tab), a 17-year-old African American, Matthew Johnson, Jr., was killed by a white cop as he fled the scene of a stolen car. When then-Mayor John Shelley and the city’s only Black supervisor, Terry Francois, showed up to the Bayview Opera House, where protests were taking place, they were pelted with rocks and tomatoes.
By 6 p.m. the next day, when the looting had not calmed, then-Gov. Pat Brown authorized use of the National Guard, which patrolled the streets in military vehicles with machine guns. The rebellion petered out, and the cop who killed Johnson Jr. wasn’t charged.
In the aftermath of the Loma Prieta “World Series” Earthquake of 1989, which killed 63 and injured another 3,757, every member of the California Guard was placed on alert. Within hours after the earthquake, the Air National Guard conducted a damage assessment, 1,050 California guardsmen were sent out into the Bay Area to assist with recovery operations and medical assistance. (opens in new tab)
More recently, in April 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a partnership between the San Francisco Police Department, National Guard, and California Highway Patrol to tackle the fentanyl crisis in the Tenderloin — which is pretty much the exact same reasoning Benioff and Trump have referenced. The difference in that case compared to Trump’s deployment in other cities is that Newsom assigned the troops and CHP to more behind-the-scenes, investigative functions instead of having troops suited, booted, and standing guard around federal buildings.
Over the last two decades, the California National Guard has also been deployed to assist with many other events, including the 2018 Camp Fire (opens in new tab) in Butte County and the race-related protests during the summer of 2020 in Vallejo (opens in new tab). The guard has also been deployed to other states or countries, such as Hurricane Katrina (opens in new tab), and the Iraq (opens in new tab) war.