Donald Trump folds like a deck chair and cancels San Francisco troop deployment after a ‘nice’ call

Donald Trump has canceled plans for a deployment of federal and immigration troops to San Francisco that had been met with serious backlash from California’s leaders and sent people out onto the streets in protest. The news came down yesterday after he had a chat with the city’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, and, well, the whole thing just got paused.

You’re probably scratching your head right now, because the Trump administration was absolutely poised to go through with this just hours before the announcement. Still, a quick conversation and a surprising level of politeness seemed to completely reverse the course of action. It’s a sudden about-face that has immediately quieted what was rapidly becoming a tense standoff in the Bay Area.

The Bay Area region was seriously on edge after reports surfaced on Wednesday about the Trump administration’s plan. The initial idea was to send over 100 Customs and Border Protection and other federal agents to the US Coast Guard base in Alameda (like LA), which is a city in the East Bay. This wasn’t some minor local operation either; the deployment was explicitly framed as being part of a much larger, large-scale immigration-enforcement plan, according to The Guardian.

California gets Trump to back down

Local officials and state leaders in California were condemning the decision left and right, arguing that it was a clear and unnecessary overreach of federal power into state and local matters, and they were preparing to resist it.

The condemnation didn’t stay only in the political sphere, either. The moment this potential deployment hit the news, the community reacted instantly. By early yesterday morning, before the cancellation was even confirmed, hundreds of protesters had already gathered outside that Coast Guard base. People were holding up signs that really got straight to the point, with slogans like “No ICE or Troops in the Bay!”

The sentiment was clear and loud: the community did not want federal agents moving in as part of a new immigration crackdown. It had quickly become a genuine pressure cooker situation, and you could tell things were escalating fast.

So, when Trump posted on social media yesterday morning, the pivot from the White House was so sudden it felt like a record scratch. He confirmed the conversation he had with Mayor Lurie, and the reason for the cancellation was surprisingly simple, at least in his telling. This is the real quote straight from his post: “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.”

Honestly, I can’t believe how quickly the whole thing evaporated. You have a full-scale, large-scale immigration-enforcement plan that has the Bay Area in an uproar, top politicians condemning it, and hundreds of protesters outside a military base—and it all gets shut down because the mayor “asked, very nicely.”

It certainly makes the administration look like it folds like a deck chair when faced with a polite request rather than a confrontation. To be fair, it’s a huge win for San Francisco and the people who were worried about the ICE presence, but the optics of a major federal plan being canceled simply over a “nice” phone call are a bit strange.