California's a mess. The once-Golden State's cities are even more of a mess. Crime, homelessness, open-air drug use, and all the unrest surrounding the Trump administration's illegal alien crackdowns have all combined to make life in California more difficult for everyone. Even some billionaires, shielded from the worst consequences of Governor Gavin "A Little Dab'll Do Ya" Newsom and the Democrat majority in Sacramento, are starting to say they've had enough.
Case in point: Salesforce CEP Marc Benioff, a classic California liberal, who supported the presidential ambitions of Her Imperial Majesty Hillary I, Dowager-Empress of Chappaqua. He's now solidly behind President Trump, including supporting the Trump administration's plans to use National Guard troops to restore order.
While other tech titans built private rocket ships and scooped up super yachts, the Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff was known for spreading large sums of money around San Francisco, his hometown. He tended toward the liberal side of Silicon Valley politics. He lectured other business leaders about the importance of helping homeless people instead of complaining about them.
But 2025 seems to have ushered in Benioff 2.0.
The benevolence remains, but the liberal leanings do not. In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Benioff said this week that he avidly supported President Trump and thought National Guard troops should be deployed to San Francisco — an action that city leaders would consider beyond the pale.
City leaders also seem to consider enforcing the law beyond the pale. They consider deporting illegal aliens - in other words, the legally required enforcement of immigration law - to be beyond the pale. They consider arresting people who are shooting up on public sidewalks to be beyond the pale, as well as arresting people who drop their trousers and drop a load of Democrat public policy on those same sidewalks.
The policies of the Democratic Party in California have been a colossal load of Schiff, and Marc Benioff isn't the only one to be getting sick and tired of it.
Mr. Benioff’s shift serves as another example of a prominent Bay Area tech executive acceding to the Republican president’s view of the world. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, gave Mr. Trump a 24-karat gold gift and heaped praise upon the president in an August visit to the Oval Office. Last month, at a White House dinner for tech barons, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Mr. Trump he was “a very refreshing change.”
That's an interesting turnabout, and one that speaks ill of Newsom's 2028 presidential ambitions.
Here's the thing: People won't put up with the governmental malfeasance of California Democrats forever. San Francisco, in particular, was once, not all that long ago, one of the world's great cities. I've written many times about how my father and some of his Army buddies visited that city in the fall of 1945, not long after V-J Day, and how Dad was impressed by the big, clean, friendly, and prosperous place "Frisco" was in those days.
It could be again, of course. All it will take is some new leadership. If it also takes a few hundred National Guard troops to get the city over the hump and help tamp down the riotous useful idiots, then clearly some of Silicon Valley's elites are willing to support that.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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