By Justin Choi
President Donald Trump on Thursday morning announced that he is calling off plans to “surge” into San Francisco, California, after a call with the city’s mayor.
The president said his administration had planned to “surge” the city Saturday but backed off after calls with “friends in the area and San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, according to a post on Truth Social. The president has floated the idea of sending a federal presence into San Francisco to address crime in recent days. He said he was “strongly recommending” sending in the National Guard during an Oct. 15 press conference in the White House’s Oval Office and told Fox News in an interview Sunday that the city went woke and that the city would become “great again” if the federal government goes in.
“The Federal Government was preparing to “surge” San Francisco, California, on Saturday, but friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge in that the Mayor, Daniel Lurie, was making substantial progress,” the president posted on his Truth Social account. (RELATED: Trump Names Dem City Where He’s Strongly Recommending’ Sending National Guard To Tackle Crime)
“I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around,” he continued. “I told him I think he’s making a mistake, because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove. I told him, ‘It’s an easier process if we do it, faster, stronger, and safer but, let’s see how you do?’”
“The people of San Francisco have come together on fighting Crime, especially since we began to take charge of that very nasty subject,” Trump wrote. “Great people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others have called saying that the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”
During a press briefing on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also told reporters that the president’s statement proves that he is “willing to work with anyone across the aisle, across the country, to do the right thing and clean up America’s cities.”
“He is genuinely interested in this effort to make our streets safer, to make our cities safe and clean again. And he heard from the mayor last night who told him that he is going to earnestly try to make his city better on his own,” Leavitt said, adding that the president also told the mayor, “‘[I]f I feel as though you continue to fail your citizens, the federal government may have to step in.’”
The president has already deployed the National Guard into Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, California and Memphis, Tennessee, this year.
The White House referred the Caller back to the president’s post and previous comments. Lurie’s office referred the Caller to a Thursday press conference from the mayor.
