SAN FRANCISCO — President Donald Trump had largely left San Francisco alone this year as he targeted Democratic-led cities and insisted that federal troops were needed to restore order.

San Francisco, long the subject of attacks from conservatives over its problems with drug use and homelessness, seemed to be turning a corner in the national consciousness. Crime was falling, and a moderate new mayor was celebrating progress toward a downtown recovery.

That changed Friday, when Trump added the city to the list of places where he might send in the National Guard, which he had already done in Washington and Los Angeles.

“You look at what the Democrats have done to San Francisco — they’ve destroyed it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We can clean that up, too — we’ll clean that one up, too.”

The idea that San Francisco was back in the president’s crosshairs was immediately shrugged off by some local leaders.

“It’s a lot of bluster and insanity,” said Nancy Tung, the chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party.

“If he wants to try to roll a tank down Lombard Street, go ahead,” she said, referring to the city’s famously serpentine street. “We’re ready.”

Seeking to project a tough-on-crime image and railing against “bloodthirsty criminals,” Trump ordered National Guard members to Washington last week, even though violent crime has fallen recently there. In June, Trump deployed them in Los Angeles over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom, suggesting they were needed to restore order during chaotic protests over deportations.

For a while, it seemed that San Francisco might have fallen off Trump’s radar. Seven months into Trump’s second term, San Francisco had generally avoided his rhetorical wrath and the militarization that took place elsewhere. Even when he took aim at a wider list of Democratic enclaves last week after first singling out Washington, Trump mentioned New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Oakland, California — but not San Francisco.

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SF Begins Law-and-Order Approach

At the time, San Francisco leaders said they were watching the administration warily. Some said it was possible the city had been ignored because it had already begun embracing a law-and-order approach before Trump returned to office.

Fed up with homelessness problems, drug-plagued neighborhoods and a wave of property crime, San Francisco voters veered toward the middle in the past several elections. They recalled three school board members and a progressive prosecutor who had eliminated cash bail, and they backed a ballot measure giving police more power.

Most notably, voters last year ousted San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, in favor of Daniel Lurie, a nonprofit leader and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who made cracking down on crime and reducing homelessness staples of his campaign.

Lurie, unlike other California leaders, has avoided national issues and has refused to utter Trump’s name this year.

That held true even Friday, when the mayor ignored Trump’s threat.

“My administration has made safe and clean streets our top priority, and the results are clear: Crime is at its lowest point in decades, visitors are coming back, and San Francisco is on the rise,” Lurie said in a statement.

‘Trump Is a Coward’

Bilal Mahmood, an elected city supervisor who represents the Tenderloin, a low-income neighborhood that has long struggled with drug markets, had a decidedly different response for the president.

“Donald Trump is a coward,” Mahmood said. “San Francisco is actually on the upswing, and he’s afraid of Democratic cities doing better.”

Trump did not offer specifics on sending National Guard troops to San Francisco, and there is no guarantee he will ever do so. When a reporter in the Oval Office asked whether he had taken “concrete steps” to deploy troops in Chicago, another city he mentioned Friday, the president said he had not.

It is also unclear whether Trump can use federal troops to police cities outside Washington, where he has greater federal authority. The question has been litigated in federal court ever since he sent the National Guard to Los Angeles, and California lawyers have argued that the president could use soldiers only to protect federal buildings, not to serve domestic law enforcement functions.

Trump Skips High-Crime Cities in Red States

Asked by The New York Times earlier this week why Trump had focused less on San Francisco this year, a White House official said that the president’s naming of specific cities was simply focused on where crime was highest. (The cities he mentioned do have some of the country’s highest crime rates, but Trump also omitted high-crime cities in Republican states, like Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis.)

“There are no theories, just the truth: President Trump wants every innocent, law-abiding American across the country to be safe — no matter what city they live in or who is in charge,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement.

Trump had not entirely ignored San Francisco this year. He threatened to defund the Presidio, a popular San Francisco park on federal land, and to turn Alcatraz Island back into a prison, though both ideas have so far made little progress. His administration stripped the name of gay rights figure Harvey Milk, a former San Francisco supervisor, from a naval ship. And federal agents have aggressively arrested immigrants outside a downtown courthouse and clashed with protesters.

Still, the president’s relative silence on San Francisco — until Friday — was a far cry from recent years, when Trump claimed without evidence that used needles from the city were flowing into the Pacific Ocean and suggested that former Vice President Kamala Harris, who got her start in California politics before facing Trump in last year’s election, had turned San Francisco into a “practically unlivable place.” During a 2023 debate with Newsom, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida memorably held up a map of the city depicting places where people had defecated on public streets.

Some Democrats had offered a different explanation for how Trump was choosing his targets: Race played a major role, they said. Black Democratic politicians, including mayors of the cities he cited, had called out the fact that four cities that Trump mentioned on his target list, along with the two cities to which he has sent National Guard troops, all have Black mayors and large Black populations.

“I know dog whistles when I hear them,” said Barbara Lee, the former member of Congress who was elected as Oakland’s first Black female mayor this year.

Oakland’s crime rates are higher than those of many other cities, including San Francisco, but Lee noted that they had been dropping. “It’s just downright fearmongering, and it’s wrong,” she said of Trump’s targeting her city.

The White House said that crime rates, not race, were factoring into which cities Trump was mentioning.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Kellen Browning and Heather Knight/Mike Kai Chen/Loren Elliott

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