Why Donald Trump Did Crisis PR for Marc Benioff

Trump credited the Salesforce CEO for his (temporary) about-face on sending troops to SF—a rare admission that POTUS and tech oligarchs are still wary of backlash.

On October 16, Marc Benioff posted a cheery selfie with a police officer. The Salesforce CEO extended a “huge thanks” to the San Francisco Police Department for what he called the “biggest and safest Dreamforce ever,” referencing his company’s annual tech conference.

Benioff was feeling the heat from an October 10 New York Times interview, where he casually agreed with one of President Donald Trump’s errant musings about sending federal troops to San Francisco. According to the Times, Benioff was annoyed at having to pay additional off-duty cops during Dreamforce, and believes SFPD should be staffed at 2,500 officers, rather than its current 1,500 figure.

If there aren’t enough SFPD officers to Benioff’s liking, he concluded, then sure, why not just have the president—who’s “doing a great job,” by the way—mobilize the troops? This potato, potahto logical leap proved to be deeply unpopular in non-MAGA corners, and so Benioff began to grovel. In addition to the cop selfie, Benioff’s October 16 post also included a (citationless) graph showing that the number of cops in San Francisco has dipped over the last decade, as well as an announcement that Salesforce was giving $1 million in signing bonuses to new SFPD officers. Benioff was backtracking on his own terms, signaling that his complaints to the Times were warranted, if perhaps straying from his purported ohana ethos.

A day later, attempting to thread another needle, Benioff said sorry for suggesting that the National Guard should be called to San Francisco—he was simply worried about making sure Dreamforce went off without a hitch, he said. But Benioff wasn’t out of the woods. He underestimated how Trump makes decisions on a Fox News-induced 72-hour tape delay, meaning the president was reportedly still relishing in the cable news discourse that Benioff had unleashed. A surge of troops in San Francisco and the Bay Area still seemed inevitable, and if it went forward, Benioff would be partially to blame.

Then came Trump’s somewhat surprising October 23 Truth Social post. He wrote that he had spoken to San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, and Lurie “asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around.” Trump claimed he told Lurie he was making a mistake, but that he agreed to give Lurie a shot, in part because of “great people” like NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Benioff, who “called saying that the future of San Francisco is great.”

Much of the ensuing coverage has centered on Lurie, the Levi Strauss heir who’s acted as though saying “Trump” out loud will turn him into a frog. In fairness, Lurie’s strategy seems to have actually staved off a federal incursion. There are important downstream effects, too—the Trump administration stood down on flooding the entire Bay Area, not just San Francisco, despite the East Bay lacking in nepo baby mayors with deep-pocketed tech friends. These are all good things, though likely temporary. Maybe Lurie runs out the clock on Trump 2.0. More probably, the next chapter of this saga will come in February, when the Bay Area hosts the Woke Super Bowl featuring Bad Bunny and Lurie does not sufficiently disavow the superstar musician for singing in Spanish.

Marc Benioff at Dreamforce 2024

I’m less interested in the Lurie angle than I am Trump’s laudatory mention of Benioff. On its face, what Trump wrote is evidence of Benioff’s unique influence. Silicon Valley powerhouses can call up the president and tell him not to send federal troops to a city, and he’ll say okay, no problem, talk again soon. There’s truth to this narrative; it’s scary and disheartening that the benevolence of tech oligarchs, who have no formal role in our government, will decide how marginalized groups are treated under the Trump Administration.

But if I may zag, I actually took a little bit of solace from Trump’s Truth Social post. The Benioff mention demonstrates his influence, yes, but it’s also a sign of weakness—a rare admission from the right-wing and the tech oligarchs that they aren’t totally immune to public (and internal) backlash.

The only subject that still activates synapses in Trump’s brain is public relations. As in: who’s more popular than him, who’s no longer “hot,” and who’s dying for positive press. He’s viewed the world through this lens his entire adult life; he built a career and then a presidency off of amplifying tabloid trash, debasing himself with gossipy radio hits, and commenting on other famous people’s transgressions. As the president of the United States, Trump’s compliments and shoutouts are invaluable, and he knows it. He relishes in it. It’s his favorite part of the job.

So it’s telling that Benioff was one of two billionaires to get a vaunted Truth Social mention, despite other figures making calls behind the scenes, too. The Wall Street Journal reported, for instance, that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was working the phones and directly told “Trump he should hear the mayor out.” The same report noted that “city business leaders also reached out to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance and David Sacks.” Altman—who’s done plenty of buddying up to Trump—didn’t get a shoutout, nor did any other San Francisco business leaders.

As to be expected, Trump’s Truth Social shoutout was confusingly couched. He said that Lurie was making a mistake by not accepting federal troops, but also, Benioff was aligned with Lurie on this issue, which factored into POTUS’s decision to stand down. Put differently: Trump implied that Benioff was as misguided as Lurie, but apparently in a naive sort of way that Trump found charming and compelling.

If you accept a certain level of bullheadedness—that Trump will never admit fault or allow for the perception that he’s waffling—then what he’s really doing is throwing Benioff a bone. Trump and Silicon Valley bigwigs are both desperate to maintain good relations with one another, and Trump is clearly aware that Benioff is pining for a merciful end to this PR nightmare, which isn’t limited to flaming from the likes of Ron Conway; according to screenshots I reviewed of a Salesforce Slack channel, at least 175 employees reacted with the “barfing” emoji to the Times headline “Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco.” (There were additionally quite a few frownie emojis, angry emojis, and thumbs-down emojis, as well as complaints that Benioff’s quotes do not engender trust, which is the company’s No. 1 value.)

That the president was willing to let Benioff serve as the figurehead for San Francisco’s sovereignty is as close to a political concession as you’re going to get in the Trump 2.0 era, which is best characterized as the End of Consequences. The Trump Administration’s corruption is so overwhelming that nothing sticks. Legitimate scandals are buried and forgotten about. It takes a Herculean effort just to get a Trump nominee with a self-described “Nazi-streak” to withdraw from consideration to lead the Office of Special Counsel (that same guy still works for the White House). The vice president recently lamented the “pearl clutching” that resulted from a report about racist Telegram chats involving Young Republican leaders. Trump himself has been reticent to fire any of his appointees, which is a huge shift from his first term.

As part of their realignment with Trump, tech leaders are hoping to be similarly insulated from pushback and advocacy efforts that challenge their bottom lines and aspirations. Early results have certainly been promising for them, but Trump’s Truth Social post offers a glimmer of something. Maybe not hope, but normalcy: that speaking completely out of turn, offending wide swaths of people in your purported community (and company) can still stir up an unwanted controversy.

If you want to believe Benioff’s justification that he changed his mind on federal troops within a few days of his catastrophic Times interview, go for it. I believe Benioff was primarily influenced to lobby Trump because of the explosive reaction to his comments, and Trump in turn recognized that he needed to bail out his friend.

Either way, Benioff is still listening to what people are saying about him, and so is the president. That’s not a big, huge win—but it’s not nothing, either.

Here’s what else we’re reading this week:

• Wired summarized a report from OpenAI about the number of weekly ChatGPT users who are exhibiting signs of psychosis, mania, or suicidal ideation. The report lists percentage estimates, which are very low, but Wired converted them to raw numbers based on OpenAI’s 800 million active users: “The company’s estimates therefore suggest that every seven days, around 560,000 people may be exchanging messages with ChatGPT that indicate they are experiencing mania or psychosis. About 2.4 million more are possibly expressing suicidal ideations or prioritizing talking to ChatGPT over their loved ones, school, or work.”

• 404 Media has a deeply depressing, if unsurprising, read about how an a16z-backed startup is selling “thousands of ‘synthetic influencers’ to manipulate social media as a service.” The concept for the product violates the terms of service of basically every social media platform, but it’s unclear whether that sort of thing matters anymore.

• I hesitate to link to a feature about gooning in my first-ever Hard Reset column, but this Harper’s Magazine story is a haunting must-read about the internet and loneliness. “Peering into Goonworld’s darkest corners has convinced me that what we are dealing with here may well be a structural flaw of networked communication itself,” Daniel Kolitz writes in his (obviously NSFW) piece.