SAN FRANCISCO — Marc Benioff didn’t just enrage San Francisco Democrats with his call for the National Guard. He sent them running for cover.
The tech billionaire’s stunning remarks encouraging a crackdown on the city’s streets were re-ignited when Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to send troops — a move Democrats quickly blamed on the Salesforce CEO.
“[Benioff] is the only thing that has brought San Francisco into his focus right now,” said District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, a moderate Democrat. “There is no secret that Mr. Benioff is now a supporter of President Trump, and that they likely have some level of communication.”
Mayor Daniel Lurie, a fellow moderate, was scheduled to appear with Benioff at an event in San Francisco earlier this week. But it was cancelled on account of a rainstorm — with organizers offering no explanation for why the event was not moved indoors. Lurie, who typically shows up for major city events and the AI industry, did not appear at Benioff’s annual Dreamforce megaconference in downtown San Francisco.
And Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman, a leader of the board’s moderate majority, acknowledged “there’s a risk” posed by Benioff for local Democrats who’ve aligned themselves with tech titans in recent years — especially with some of those figures embracing elements of the MAGA agenda.
“It’s inspired fury and a sense of betrayal in some people,” Mandelman said. “It’s an awkward situation because the Trump administration is threatening San Franciscans in multiple ways, but Marc Benioff has been a great benefactor to the city.”
Now, the city’s moderate political establishment is racing to contain the blast radius, as Trump and Benioff roil public discourse in this citadel of Democratic politics. Centrist Democrats here wrested control of the city from more progressive forces in recent years. Benioff, the Time magazine owner, was already turning heads last fall when he criticized then-Vice President Kamala Harris for declining to sit with the publication, and before that threatened to pull Dreamforce from the city. But his incendiary comments have left Democrats struggling to distance themselves from him. — while acknowledging how closely they are yoked to his years of largesse in civic causes.
Jenkins, while sharply criticizing the call for the federal government to bring in troops, said Trump’s remarks — where the president said at a press conference with FBI Director Kash Patel, “We have great support in San Francisco, so I would like to recommend that for inclusion, maybe in your next group” — seem to be “confusing government officials with Mr. Benioff.”
If the fear for moderate politicians is that the fallout could offer progressives a chance to regain some clout at City Hall after years of stinging losses, one vocal leader on the left already sees an opening.
“The conservative, or so-called moderate, forces in San Francisco are scrambling to get away from Benioff as fast as they can,” said former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, a leader of the city’s progressive wing who lost last year’s mayoral race.
Benioff isn’t making it easy. He has since softened his comments, arguing that he’s focused on keeping 45,000 conference attendees safe amid the city’s police shortage. He declined to address the controversy surrounding his remarks during a press conference on Tuesday.
But the atmosphere at Dreamforce, a gathering of techies and political leaders, reflected both Benioff’s and Silicon Valley’s broader movement toward Trump: The Salesforce leader is a former supporter of Hillary Clinton who once championed a tax increase to pay for homeless services, and pivoted abruptly to hosting David Sacks, a Trump ally, onstage.
On the last day of the conference, famed venture capitalist Ron Conway, a prolific Democratic donor and a confidant of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, resigned from the board of Salesforce’s philanthropic foundation. As The New York Times first reported and confirmed by POLITICO, Conway cited Benioff’s political metamorphosis in an email to the CEO.
“It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” Conway wrote.
Pelosi said in a statement that “San Francisco does not want or need Donald Trump’s chaos” but did not mention Benioff directly.
Last year, Benioff was joined by Gavin Newsom at the conference, where the California governor signed legislation onstage. Newsom was absent this year (his spokesperson, Izzy Gardon, said in a text message that the absence was due to preexisting scheduling conflicts and unrelated to Benioff’s comments.)
Instead, Benioff was joined this year by Sacks, the “PayPal mafia” member and billionaire investor who Trump appointed as his AI and crypto czar after he hosted a multimillion-dollar campaign fundraiser at his mansion in San Francisco’s ritzy Pacific Heights neighborhood.
The memory of past Democratic headliners, including former President Bill Clinton in 2010, made Benioff’s comments sting more sharply for Mark Buell, a longtime San Francisco megadonor and civic leader. Buell’s wife, Susie Tompkins Buell, the co-founder of The North Face clothing line, is a close friend and confidant of the Clintons and a major Democratic Party donor.
“These comments are terribly damaging” to the city and its reputation, Mark Buell told POLITICO. He said he believed Benioff was simply trying to appease a president with “thin-skin.”
“I cannot imagine it’s his core personal belief,” Buell said. “Everybody knows that to get anything out of [Trump] you have to flatter him.”
But Jenkins and other moderate leaders were less forgiving. They accused Benioff of undermining the city’s progress in reducing crime. Several suggested Benioff, who moved from California to Hawaii in 2021, is unaware of how the city’s political landscape has shifted since the pandemic.
“I’d rather hear from the titans of tech who are here and experiencing the city on a regular basis,” said Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council, a powerful business advocacy group led by CEOs.
He added, “Marc isn’t here anymore. It doesn’t seem like the same Benioff.”
San Francisco, a famously liberal city once ridiculed for what Republicans cast as its soft-on-crime policies, has pivoted more toward the political center in recent years. Moderate Democrats flipped control of the Board of Supervisors and the local Democratic Party in 2024. Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, was swept into office at the same time. Voters also recalled a progressive district attorney and three school board members in 2022.
Those wins came as tech donors poured tens of millions of dollars into city elections — backing centrist Democrats who appealed to voters’ frustrations over the city’s pandemic-era decline that led to deteriorating street conditions with increases in crime and homelessness. Others, like Benioff, who had stopped giving in local elections, backed major civic projects significant to Democratic politicians here.
Jay Cheng, director of Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, one of the city’s most financially formidable moderate advocacy groups, said Benioff painted an inaccurate portrayal of street conditions.
“San Francisco is a city that has shown it can turn itself around and move to the political center by itself,” Cheng said. “Local voters have demonstrated they’re willing to do what it takes. Of course, we have a long way to go.”
Meanwhile, several prominent Democrats labored to avoid the spectacle — at least directly — while mounting a defense of the city.
Lurie, who has avoided drawing Trump’s ire, or saying his name in public, did not change his political calculus following the threat of a military occupation of his home city. His office spent the week highlighting the city’s plummeting crime rate, including a 70-year low in homicides, and its police recruitment efforts. Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, joined the PR blitz, sending out a statement touting recent reductions in crime in the city.
Lurie said Wednesday that he had called Benioff last weekend about his comments and to highlight the city’s improved public-safety outlook.
“People are entitled to their own opinions,” the mayor told reporters. “But they’re not entitled to their own facts.”
Tyler Katzenberger contributed to this report.
