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jensen huang
At Request of Billionaire ‘Friends,’ Trump Pulls Plug on Troop Deployment to San Francisco
"Maybe other cities should try to convince a wealthy tech CEO or two to keep the president from siccing his agents on them," quipped one writer.
Oct 23, 2025
After threatening for days to deploy troops to San Francisco, President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would pull back for the moment, apparently after some of his billionaire "friends" in the city called him and asked him not to.
"The Federal Government was preparing to 'surge' San Francisco, California, on Saturday," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "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."
Trump said he "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. I told [Lurie], I think he is 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?'"
In a separate post, Lurie affirmed that he had spoken with Trump. He said he told the president that "San Francisco is on the rise," and that a military occupation would "hinder our recovery."
Although Trump is walking back his troop threat, for now, US Customs and Border Protection agents still arrived in the Bay Area on Thursday as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrants.
The Associated Press reported that "police used at least one flash-bang grenade to clear a handful of demonstrators from the entrance" of Coast Guard Island in Alameda, where the CBP agents will be based.
In addition to threatening San Francisco in recent days, Trump has sent National Guard troops to Los Angeles, California; Washington, DC; Portland, Oregon; and Chicago, Illinois—where a judge has halted the deployment.
Like virtually all of the cities where Trump has either surged or threatened to surge federalized troops, San Francisco has no crime wave to "turn around." In fact, crime has been falling precipitously in the city. Homicides dropped by 35% during 2024 and hit a 60-year low this year, contradicting Trump's assertions that the city is a "mess" and that people there lived in constant fear of being "mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted, or shot."
Lurie said he agreed to help Trump go to war on this imaginary crime wave, and said he would welcome "would welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and US attorney."
Trump said he was persuaded to hold off on the surge of troops after he was called by two Silicon Valley billionaires, Marc Benioff and Jensen Huang, whom he called "great people."
Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was a longtime Democrat who quickly morphed into an outspoken Trump supporter after his victory in 2024. He was also an initial champion of Trump's proposal to send troops to San Francisco, but later backed off and even apologized after facing criticism from local officials and former political allies.
Huang, the CEO of the computer tech company Nvidia, meanwhile, cut an unprecedented deal with Trump in August that allowed the company to sell computer chips in China if it handed 15% of the revenue from those sales to the federal government, which was described as a "shakedown" by one financial columnist.
Trump said that these two and some unspecified "others" called him, "saying that the future of San Francisco is great" and that "they want to give [Lurie's efforts] a 'shot.'"
"Therefore," Trump said, "we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday."
Hafiz Rashid, a writer for the New Republic, quipped that "maybe other cities should try to convince a wealthy tech CEO or two to keep the president from siccing his agents on them."
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Trump-Starmer AI Deal Slammed for Putting 'Interests of US Tech Bros' Ahead of the Common Good
"Instead of bending over backwards to appease Trump in an attempt to avoid his tariff bullying, it’s time for Starmer to show real leadership and stand up to him," said one campaigner.
Sep 18, 2025
Critics of the artificial intelligence pact signed Thursday by US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that the deal sacrifices the climate, data privacy, creators' copyrights, and British sovereignty on the altar of Silicon Valley profits.
Speaking at Chequers—the Buckinghamshire country estate of UK prime ministers in Buckinghamshire—Trump said that "we're taking the next logical step with a historic agreement on science and technology partnerships, and this will create new government, academic, and private sector cooperation in areas such as AI, which is taking over the world."
Laughing, Trump turned to tech bosses gathered for the event and—singling out Jensen Huang, CEO of chip-maker Nvidia—said: "And I'm looking at you guys. You're taking over the world, Jensen. I don't know what you're doing here. I hope you're right."
Along with Huang—who heads the world's largest publicly traded company—the CEOs of Apple, and ChatGPT creator OpenAI joined Trump on his UK trip.
Starmer said the deal involves more than $200 billion in total US investments and will create 15,000 jobs over the next decade. The prime minister named US companies including Amazon, Blackstone, Boeing, Citigroup, and Microsoft, and UK firms like AstraZeneca, BP, GSK, and Rolls Royce as being part of the deal.
Other companies involved in the agreement include Google and its AI laboratory DeepMind, OpenAI, Oracle, Salesforce, and ScaleAI in the United States and AI Pathfinder, DataVita, NScale, and Sage in Britain.
DeSmog UK deputy director Sam Bright reported Thursday that the investment bank led by Warren Stephens, Trump's ambassador to London, owns hundreds of millions of dollars in shares of tech companies involved in the AI deal, including Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, and Nvidia.
Like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Nvidia, Stephens—who is a billionaire—made a seven-figure donation to Trump's inauguration fund.
Prominent critics of the agreement include former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who is also Meta's former president of global affairs. Speaking Wednesday at a Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge, Clegg said the deal leaves Britain with "sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley" and "is just another version of the United Kingdom holding on to Uncle Sam’s coattails."
Opposition to the tech deal was also widespread Wednesday at a central London protest against Trump's visit organized by the Stop Trump Coalition.
Nick Dearden, director of the campaign group Global Justice Now and a spokesperson for the Stop Trump Coalition, noted in an interview with Wired senior business editor Natasha Bernal that the details of the pact have not been made public.
"We have not seen the text of the deal. We don’t know what we have given away," Dearden said. "We know that some of the tech barons accompanying Trump want us to drop parts of our regulation, want us to drop the digital services tax, want us to make it easier for them to acquire and merge with each other to become even bigger monopolies, so we are worried about that.”
So Trump swept into the UK to be wined and dined by the King.Big Tech bosses came too, bearing pledges of huge UK investments (mostly for data centres).Our govt, desperate for good economic news, is boosting this as a win for the UK.But the *point* of US Big Tech is to monopolise the data.
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— Critical Takes on Corporate Power (@criticaltakes.bsky.social) September 18, 2025 at 5:14 AM
Gobal Justice Now trade campaigner Seema Syeda said in a statement:
This toxic technology pact that favors the interests of US tech bros and rich corporations over ordinary people must be opposed at all costs. It’s a democratic scandal that the public and Parliament have been left in the dark as to its contents to date, but what we do know should ring alarm bells. Instead of bending over backwards to appease Trump in an attempt to avoid his tariff bullying, it’s time for Starmer to show real leadership and stand up to him. We can’t let an egomaniac like Trump hold our rights and democracy hostage.
Clive Teague—who was at the London rally supporting Extinction Rebellion Waverley and Borders in Surrey—told Bernal that he does not oppose AI if it is powered by renewable energy.
"We can’t keep burning fossil fuels to keep feeding into these data centers, because it’ll swamp the requirements for the rest of the world," Teague said.
Global Justice Now also warned that the tech deal could expose National Health Service (NHS) patient data to exploitation, wweaken digital privacy protections, thwart regulation of AI, and limit the government's taxation options.
Also sounding the alarm on the US-UK AI deal are scores of creators and creative groups including Elton John, Paul McCartney, and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, who decried what they say is the Starmer government's failure to adequately protect copyrighted works from unauthorized use by AI companies.
As the Prime Minister prepares to meet President Trump during the state visit, WGGB has joined over 70 of the UK’s leading creators + creative orgs in signing an open letter demanding the Government explains its failure to protect the rights of UK copyright holderswritersguild.org.uk/creators-ai/
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— Writers' Guild of Great Britain (@writersguildgb.bsky.social) September 16, 2025 at 2:44 AM
"Artificial intelligence companies have ingested millions of copyright works without permission or payment, in total disregard for the UK’s legal protections," they said in an open letter. "The first duty of any government is to protect its citizens—not to promote corporate interests, particularly where they are primarily based abroad."
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