Flanked by city leaders, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie discusses President Donald Trump’s comments that he has called off a surge of federal law enforcement in San Francisco on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco did what he does best after the Trump administration prepared to send border agents to the Bay Area for a major crackdown on immigration this week. He stayed calm. He worked the phones. He “power mapped.” In doing so, Lurie and his team visualised concentric circles of prominent business leaders who could persuade President Trump and determined who might lobby the executives to make those important calls. They wanted to deliver the message, in the most diplomatic way possible, that San Francisco was not the apocalyptic landscape that the president sees on Fox News. Soon, a host of billionaires with strong ties to the city were on the phone with Trump and Vice President JD Vance, a former venture capitalist in San Francisco. Lurie, 48, a philanthropist and an heir to the Levi Strauss denim fortune, had never served in elected office until he became San Francisco’s mayor in January. To some fellow Democrats, he has been too scripted at a time that has called for brash leadership to counter Trump. Some have also resented his connections with tech billionaires. But Lurie’s supporters say his approach was simply an extension of his quiet leadership and his ability to work the levers behind the scenes in ways that few others can. He leaned on Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and a resident of the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood, who served on the mayor’s transition team before his inauguration. He relied on Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO who was eager to move past his viral comments calling on Trump to send the National Guard to San Francisco – words he later recanted and apologised for. He received help from Jensen Huang, the CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia and the owner of a mansion on San Francisco’s Billionaire’s Row. Ron Conway, the VC known as the Godfather of Silicon Valley, also lobbied behind the scenes. He called Republicans he thought could persuade Trump to back off. Lurie wanted the intermediaries to be factual, persuasive, private and totally noncombative. Trump called Lurie late Wednesday night, and by the end of the conversation, he had agreed to call off the surge in San Francisco that he had planned for Saturday, according to his post on Truth Social. Trump also said the tech leaders had vouched for the mayor’s efforts to increase public safety in San Francisco. “I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance,” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday morning. “The people of San Francisco have come together on fighting Crime, especially since we began to take charge of that very nasty subject.” It was perhaps the most positive message Trump had delivered about San Francisco – or any Democratic-run city – this year.