Trump Says National Guard Is Coming to San Francisco Next, May Use Insurrection Act

In a Sunday morning interview with Fox News, Trump reinforced his plans to send National Guard troops to San Francisco, potentially invoking the Insurrection Act. He said “they want us in San Francisco” and San Francisco was great before it went “woke.”

It appears that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s overdue retraction and apology for his comments from last week urging Trump to send troops to San Francisco did little to prevent the president from taking him up on his original request — or perhaps Benioff’s perceived betrayal emboldened Trump. As the Chronicle reports, the president appeared on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures where he named San Francisco as the National Guard’s next destination, but as KTVU notes, no timeline for the deployment has been announced.

“We’re going to go to San Francisco. The difference is I think they want us 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, per KTVU.

This prompted local politicians and residents to reiterate that the city does not need the federal government’s help, including Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener, per KTVU, who had also just given a comment on the matter two days earlier. “First of all, San Franciscans don’t want him to send his personal army to occupy and invade San Francisco. We don’t want that. So he needs to go away, back off. But we also know that he hates San Francisco, he hates what we represent because we support immigrants, we support LGBTQ people,” Wiener told KTVU.

Newsom also chimed in — again, per the Chronicle. “Fact check: Nobody wants you here,” he wrote on X. “You will ruin one of America’s greatest cities.”

Resident Richard Soriano told KTVU the city’s law enforcement is already keeping residents safe. “The city’s putting their best effort in to make sure that it is safe around here. You see SFPD roaming around,” he said.

Trump went on to tell FOX News he may invoke the rarely used Insurrection Act, which gives him the power to deploy troops on US soil. “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act,” he said, per the Chronicle. “Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that’s unquestioned power. I choose not to, but I’m met constantly by fake politicians, politicians that think that they — you know, it’s not a part of the radical left movement to have safety. … These cities have to be safe.”

Steve Woolpert, professor emeritus of politics at St. Mary’s College of California, said he sees little evidence that troops are needed in San Francisco. “I think it’ll be the same as it was in Portland, the same as it was in Chicago: two different courts, and they both said that the facts on the ground do not add up to the facts necessary to invoke Section 10 of the US Code or the Insurrection Act,” Woolpert told KTVU.

As the Chronicle notes, Trump has been met with legal battles in several cities. A federal judge in Los Angeles found that he violated the Posse Comitatus Act by having troops act as police there. His attempts to send troops to Portland and Chicago have also been blocked.

“We’re going to go to San Francisco, and we’re going to make it great. We’re going to make it great. It’ll be great again. San Francisco is a great city. It won’t be great if it keeps going like this,” Trump reiterated to FOX News — sounding like a broken record — per KTVU.

Image: Scott Olson/Getty Images