For a brief, surreal moment this week, the Bay Area found itself at the mercy of a presidential mood swing. On one day, federal agents were supposedly on their way to San Francisco. By the next, the president had simply changed his mind. No formal notice, no bureaucratic reversal — just a phone call, a tweet, and a handful of billionaires whispering in his ear.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie says the turnaround happened after Donald Trump personally phoned him. “He just called,” the mayor explained. “No intermediaries.” What followed, according to both men’s accounts, was a conversation so absurdly casual that it might as well have taken place at a coffee shop.
The president talked. The mayor listened — and recited a list of San Francisco’s improving crime stats: violent crime at a 70-year low, tent encampments declining, office leases outpacing vacancies, retail and convention bookings up by 50 percent. “This is a city on the rise,” Lurie told reporters later. “That’s what I told him, and that’s what I tell everybody.”
Apparently, that was enough. Trump announced soon after that he would not “surge San Francisco on Saturday.” His explanation? A mix of good vibes, better numbers, and the polite persuasion of “friends of mine” — namely, local billionaires Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff.
A presidency by whim
It’s a relief, of course, that San Francisco won’t see federal border agents or National Guard troops patrolling Market Street this weekend. But the manner in which the decision was made — or unmade — should alarm anyone who still believes in a functioning democratic process.
If a couple of CEOs can dial up the president and talk him out of a domestic military deployment, what happens when they call him in favor of one? If policy hinges not on data, strategy, or constitutional boundaries but on who can get through to the Oval Office with the right tone of voice, then we’ve drifted far from the norms of American governance.
It’s hard not to hear echoes of feudal politics in this — a kind of modern-day monarchy where barons of industry appeal directly to the king, bypassing any institution that might check his power. One day San Francisco’s “crime crisis” justifies boots on the ground; the next day, a few well-placed billionaires decide that actually, things look fine.
The billionaire filter
The irony is rich: these same billionaires helped shape the city that now frustrates them. The Bay Area’s wealth gap, its housing scarcity, and even parts of its tech-driven drug economy are, in one way or another, products of the tech boom they led.
Yet, when San Francisco’s rough edges make them uncomfortable, the instinct isn’t to engage with local governance or social programs — it’s to reach for the biggest lever available: Washington, D.C. And in this case, Washington listened.
Trump’s social-media summary of the conversation was telling. He described how “friends of mine” urged him to reconsider and praised Lurie for asking “very nicely.” No policy framework. No inter-agency coordination. Just personal vibes — and vibes, in this White House, often substitute for governance.
That’s not a partisan critique; it’s a procedural one. The American presidency, at least in theory, should not operate on the emotional temperature of its occupant or the social networks of its wealthiest citizens.
The optics of “gnarliness”
Lurie’s case against the deployment rested on facts, and those facts are solid. By almost any metric, San Francisco is statistically safer than it’s been in decades. Homicides are at near-record lows. Property crime and car break-ins — once so rampant that “bip city” became a nickname — have dropped sharply.
But statistics alone can’t compete with optics, and the optics remain gnarly. Downtown still bears the scars of post-pandemic vacancy. Open-air drug use, tent clusters, and visible homelessness fuel the perception of chaos. It doesn’t matter that many of those encampments are shrinking — what matters is that the city feels unsafe.
That’s the political challenge facing Lurie: he can’t just fix the numbers; he has to fix the vibe. And those vibes are now being measured not by ordinary residents but by tech executives and venture capitalists who command direct lines to the president of the United States.
The “retail is back” diplomacy
It’s almost comic to imagine the call itself. The mayor, coffee in hand, patiently listing civic improvements to a man currently demolishing the East Wing of the White House to install a $300-million ballroom. “Retail is back,” Lurie reportedly said — a statement both earnest and wildly optimistic when addressed to someone who once branded a hotel empire with his own name.
Still, it worked. No one had to buy Trump’s San Francisco property at an inflated price. No one promised to crown the Salesforce Tower with a golden Trump sign. A few upbeat sentences, a courteous tone, and the crisis evaporated.
For now.
A temporary reprieve
Trump’s follow-up post — “They want to give it a shot” — suggests that this is less a resolution than a probation period. The mayor has been granted a chance to prove that San Francisco can “clean up” on its own. Federal involvement may still arrive, packaged not as a troop surge but as “assistance” from the FBI or DEA. And as history shows, every favor from Washington comes with strings attached.
That’s the Faustian bargain at the heart of this story: local leaders must play to the president’s ego while keeping federal power at bay. If Lurie truly averted a confrontation through honesty and calm persistence, he deserves credit. But it’s a troubling precedent when truth competes with whimsy for the commander-in-chief’s attention.
Governance by mood swing
The episode leaves San Francisco — and the nation — in a precarious place. The city’s safety may be up, but its dignity feels tested. Americans have lived through chaotic presidencies before, but rarely one so openly transactional, where billionaires double as policy advisors and flattery doubles as diplomacy.
The problem isn’t just the capriciousness of one man’s leadership; it’s how quickly that capriciousness becomes normalized. When billionaires lobby the president to reverse a military action, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief, we forget how abnormal the premise was in the first place.
In the end, San Francisco may emerge fine — its streets quieter, its mayor caffeinated, its billionaires momentarily satisfied. But the episode serves as a stark reminder that power in America still answers too often to proximity and privilege rather than process.
Retail, as the mayor says, may be back. But so, too, is the uneasy truth that governance, in this era, remains a luxury commodity — brokered not in Congress or City Hall, but in the private conversations of men who can afford to pick up the phone and call the president.