Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on Wednesday that Marc Benioff remains like family to him, even after the tech titan touched off a political firestorm this month when he said that President Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco.
Mr. Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, and Mr. Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, are longtime friends. Their families are so close that Mr. Benioff is the godfather of Mr. Newsom’s oldest child, Montana. And, the governor said, Mr. Benioff’s mother “has a special place in my heart.”
“Marc’s family,” Mr. Newsom said in an interview Wednesday with The New York Times after an economic development conference in Stockton, Calif.
The two were allies in a different San Francisco era, years before each had a meteoric rise in their chosen fields. Mr. Benioff and his wife have donated to Mr. Newsom’s political campaigns over many years.
So the governor was surprised when he read that Mr. Benioff had told The New York Times this month he wanted troops sent to San Francisco to tackle crime. Few things might have set the friends further apart.
Mr. Newsom has attacked Mr. Trump ever since the president deployed troops to Los Angeles in June, warning Americans of his threat to democracy in a nationally televised speech and trolling the president on social media. He sued the Trump administration over the troop deployment to Los Angeles and said this week that he would sue the president again if the National Guard was sent to San Francisco.
Mr. Benioff was long seen as a more progressive voice than his tech billionaire counterparts and hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential run. He has been praised for his hefty donations to San Francisco institutions, including liberal causes. But he has surprised Democrats this year by aligning with Mr. Trump.
Though Mr. Benioff has made a rightward turn, his comments stung leaders in San Francisco — and Mr. Newsom — because they felt the city had been unfairly maligned by conservatives for years.
“It was disappointing,” Mr. Newsom said. “But that doesn’t change the way I feel about him as a human being, and his family.”
The governor said he had reached out to his friend after reading the Times article in which Mr. Benioff said that he had thrown his support behind Mr. Trump and thought the president should send troops to San Francisco.
They engaged in “a lot of back and forth,” Mr. Newsom said, declining to share details about their conversations.
Mr. Benioff told The Times that he had never been as progressive as some believed and that he had been registered to vote as a Republican before he became an independent. He said that he was concerned about crime in San Francisco and that the city needed to hire more police officers.
A week after Mr. Benioff’s initial comments were published, he publicly apologized and said that he no longer believed the president should send the National Guard to San Francisco. He said he had made the comments with a sense of caution as the city prepared to welcome 50,000 visitors for his company’s annual Dreamforce conference.
As Mr. Newsom spoke on Wednesday afternoon, Customs and Border Protection agents were heading to the San Francisco Bay Area for an immigration enforcement operation that the governor said he believed would soon lead to a deployment of troops. Immigration raids are likely to draw protests, which the president will use as a pretext to send in the National Guard, the governor predicted.
It is part of an “authoritarian playbook,” Mr. Newsom said.
He said he thought that Mr. Trump would have sent federal agents to the Bay Area regardless of Mr. Benioff’s comments, because the president has been saying for several weeks that San Francisco was among the several cities to which he wanted to send military forces. But Mr. Newsom said it was possible that Mr. Benioff’s remarks “may have accelerated something.”
Still, the governor called his friend “a good human being.”
“We just do not see the world with the same set of eyes,” he said.
Laurel Rosenhall is a Sacramento-based reporter covering California politics and government for The Times.
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