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SAN FRANCISCO — Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a trailblazing San Francisco Democrat who leveraged decades of power in the U.S. House to become one of the most influential political leaders of her generation, will not run for reelection in 2026, she said Thursday.

The former House speaker, 85, who has been in Congress since 1987 and oversaw both of President Trump’s first-term impeachments, had been pushing off her 2026 decision until after Tuesday’s vote on Proposition 50, a ballot measure she backed and helped bankroll to redraw California’s congressional maps in her party’s favor.

With the measure’s resounding passage, Pelosi said it was time to start clearing the path for another Democrat to represent San Francisco — one of the nation’s most liberal bastions — in Congress, as some are already vying to do.

“With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative,” Pelosi said in a nearly six-minute video she posted online Thursday morning, in which she also recounted major achievements from her long career.

Pelosi did not immediately endorse a would-be successor, but challenged her constituents to stay engaged.

“As we go forward, my message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power,” she said. “We have made history, we have made progress, we have always led the way — and now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy, and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”

Pelosi’s announcement drew immediate reaction across the political world, with Democrats lauding her dedication and accomplishments and President Trump, a frequent target and critic of hers, ridiculing her as a “highly overrated politician.”

Pelosi has not faced a serious challenge for her seat since President Reagan was in office, and has won recent elections by wide margins. Just a year ago, she won reelection with 81% of the vote.

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However, Pelosi was facing two hard-to-ignore challengers from her own party in next year’s Democratic primary: state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), 55, a prolific and ambitious lawmaker with a strong base of support in the city, and Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, a Democratic political operative and tech millionaire who is infusing his campaign with personal cash.

Their challenges come amid a shifting tide against gerontocracy in Democratic politics more broadly, as many in the party’s base have increasingly questioned the ability of its longtime leaders — especially those in their 70s and 80s — to sustain an energetic and effective resistance to President Trump and his MAGA agenda.

In announcing his candidacy for Pelosi’s seat last month after years of deferring to her, Wiener said he simply couldn’t wait any longer. “The world is changing, the Democratic Party is changing, and it’s time,” he said.

Chakrabarti — who helped Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) topple another older Democratic incumbent with a message of generational change in 2018 — said voters in San Francisco “need a whole different approach” to governing after years of longtime party leaders failing to deliver.

In an interview Thursday, Wiener called Pelosi an “icon” who delivered for San Francisco in more ways than most people can comprehend, with whom he shared a “deep love” for the city. He also recounted, in particular, Pelosi’s early advocacy for AIDS treatment and care in the 1980s, and the impact it had on him personally.

“I remember vividly what it felt like as a closeted gay teenager, having a sense that the country had abandoned people like me, and that the country didn’t care if people like me died. I was 17, and that was my perception of my place in the world,” Wiener said. “Nancy Pelosi showed that that wasn’t true, that there were people in positions of power who gave a damn about gay men and LGBTQ people and people living with HIV and those of us at risk for HIV — and that was really powerful.”

Chakrabarti, in a statement Thursday, thanked Pelosi for her “decades of service that defined a generation of politics” and for “doing something truly rare in Washington: making room for the next one.”

While anticipated by many, Pelosi’s decision nonetheless reverberated through political circles, including as yet another major sign that a new political era is dawning for the political left — as also evidenced by the stunning rise of Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist elected Tuesday as New York City’s next mayor.

Known as a relentless and savvy party tactician, Pelosi had fought off concerns about her age in the past, including when she chose to run again last year. The first woman ever elected speaker in 2007, Pelosi has long cultivated and maintained a spry image belying her age by walking the halls of Congress in signature four-inch stilettos, and by keeping up a rigorous schedule of flying between work in Washington and constituent events in her home district.

However, that veneer has worn down in recent years, including when she broke her hip during a fall in Europe in December.

That occurred just after fellow octogenarian President Biden sparked intense speculation about his age and cognitive abilities with his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June of last year. The performance led to Biden being pushed to drop out of the race — in part by Pelosi — and to Vice President Kamala Harris moving to the top of the ticket and losing badly to Trump in November.

Democrats have also watched other older liberal leaders age and die in power in recent years, including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, another San Francisco power player in Washington. When Ginsburg died in office at 87, it handed Trump a third Supreme Court appointment. When Feinstein died in office ill at 90, it was amid swirling questions about her competency to serve.

By bowing out of the 2026 race, Pelosi — who stepped down from party leadership in 2022 — diminished her own potential for an ungraceful last chapter in office. But she did not concede that her current effectiveness has diminished one bit.

Pelosi was one of the most vocal and early proponents of Proposition 50, which amends the state constitution to give state Democrats the power through 2030 to redraw California’s congressional districts in their favor.

The measure was in response to Republicans in red states such as Texas redrawing maps in their favor, at Trump’s direction. Pelosi championed it as critical to preserving Democrats’ chances of winning back the House next year and checking Trump through the second half of his second term, something she and others suggested will be vital for the survival of American democracy.

On Tuesday, California voters resoundingly approved Proposition 50.

In her video, Pelosi noted a litany of accomplishments during her time in office, crediting them not to herself but to her constituents, to labor groups, to nonprofits and private entrepreneurs, to the city’s vibrant diversity and flair for innovation.

She noted bringing federal resources to the city to recover after the Loma Prieta earthquake, and San Francisco’s leading role in tackling the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis through partnerships with UC San Francisco and San Francisco General, which “pioneered comprehensive community based care, prevention and research” still used today.

She mentioned passing the Ryan White CARE Act and the Affordable Care Act, building out various San Francisco and California public transportation systems, building affordable housing and protecting the environment — all using federal dollars her position helped her to secure.

“It seems prophetic now that the slogan of my very first campaign in 1987 was, ‘A voice that will be heard,’ and it was you who made those words come true. It was the faith that you had placed in me, and the latitude that you have given me, that enabled me to shatter the marble ceiling and be the first woman speaker of the House, whose voice would certainly be heard,” Pelosi said. “It was an historic moment for our country, and it was momentous for our community — empowering me to bring home billions of dollars for our city and our state.”

After her announcement, Trump ridiculed her, telling Fox News that her decision not to seek reelection was “a great thing for America” and calling her “evil, corrupt, and only focused on bad things for our country.”

“She was rapidly losing control of her party and it was never coming back,” Trump told the outlet, according to a segment shared by the White House. “I’m very honored she impeached me twice, and failed miserably twice.”

The House succeeded in impeaching Trump twice, but the Senate acquitted him both times.

Pelosi’s fellow Democrats, by contrast, heaped praise on her as a one-of-a-kind force in U.S. politics — a savvy tactician, a prolific legislator and a mentor to an entire generation of fellow Democrats.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a longtime Pelosi ally who helped her impeach Trump, called Pelosi “the greatest Speaker in American history” as a result of “her tenacity, intellect, strategic acumen and fierce advocacy.”

“She has been an indelible part of every major progressive accomplishment in the 21st Century — her work in Congress delivered affordable health care to millions, created countless jobs, raised families out of poverty, cleaned up pollution, brought LGBTQ+ rights into the mainstream, and pulled our economy back from the brink of destruction not once, but twice,” Schiff said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Pelosi “has inspired generations,” that her “courage and conviction to San Francisco, California, and our nation has set the standard for what public service should be,” and that her impact on the country was “unmatched.”

“Wishing you the best in this new chapter — you’ve more than earned it,” Newsom wrote above Pelosi’s online video.

A planned increase in federal immigration enforcement in the Bay Area is now on pause throughout the region and in major East Bay cities, not just in San Francisco, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said Friday.

Lee said in a statement that Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez had “confirmed through her communications” with federal immigration officials that the planned operations were “cancelled for the greater Bay Area — which includes Oakland — at this time.”

The announcement followed lingering concerns about ramped up immigration enforcement among East Bay leaders after President Trump and San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced Thursday that a planned “surge” had been called off in San Francisco.

Trump and Lurie had very specifically addressed San Francisco, even as additional Border Patrol agents were being staged across the bay on Coast Guard Island, which is in the waters between Alameda and Oakland.

At a press conference following Trump’s annoucement about San Francisco, Lee had said the situation remained “fluid,” that she had received no such assurances about the East Bay and that Oakland was continuing to prepare for enhanced immigration enforcement in the region.

Alameda County Dist. Atty. Ursula Jones Dickson had previously warned that the announced stand down in San Francisco could be a sign the administration was looking to focus on Oakland instead — and make an example of it.

“We know that they’re baiting Oakland, and that’s why San Francisco, all of a sudden, is off the table,” Jones Dickson said Thursday morning. “So I’m not going to be quiet about what we know is coming. We know that their expectation is that Oakland is going to do something to cause them to make us the example.”

The White House on Friday directed questions about the scope of the pause in operations and whether it applied to the East Bay to the Department of Homeland Security, which referred The Times back to Trump’s statement about San Francisco on Friday — despite its making no mention of the East Bay or Oakland.

In that statement, posted to his Truth Social platform, Trump had written that a “surge” had been planned for San Francisco starting Saturday, but that he had called it off after speaking to Lurie.

Trump said Lurie had asked “very nicely” that Trump “give him a chance to see if he can turn it around” in the city, and that business leaders — including Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Marc Benioff of Salesforce — had expressed confidence in Lurie.

Trump said he told Lurie that it would be “easier” to make San Francisco safer if federal forces were sent in, but told him, “let’s see how you do.”

Lurie in recent days has touted falling crime rates and numbers of homeless encampments in the city, and said in his own announcement of the stand down that he had told Trump that San Francisco was “on the rise” and that “having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery.”

In California and elsewhere, the Trump administration has aggressively sought to expand the reach and authority of the Border Patrol and federal immigration agents. Last month, the DOJ fired its top prosecutor in Sacramento after she told Gregory Bovino, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector, that he could not carry out indiscriminate immigration raids around Sacramento this summer.

In Oakland on Thursday, the planned surge in enforcement had sparked protests near the entrance to Coast Guard Island, and drew widespread condemnation from local liberal officials and immigrant advocacy organizations.

On Thursday night, security officers at the base opened fire on the driver of a U-Haul truck who was reversing the truck toward them, wounding the driver and a civilian nearby. The FBI is investigating that incident.

Some liberal officials had warned that federal agents who violated the rights of Californians could face consequences — even possible arrest — from local law enforcement, which drew condemnation from federal officials.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche responded with a scathing letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and others on Thursday in which he wrote that any attempt by local law enforcement to arrest federal officers doing their jobs would be viewed by the Justice Department as “both illegal and futile” and as part of a “criminal conspiracy.”

Blanche wrote that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution precludes any federal law enforcement official to be “held on a state criminal charge where the alleged crime arose during the performance of his federal duties,” and that the Justice Department would pursue legal action against any state officials who advocate for such enforcement.

“In the meantime, federal agents and officers will continue to enforce federal law and will not be deterred by the threat of arrest by California authorities who have abdicated their duty to protect their constituents,” Blanche wrote.

The threat of arrest for federal officers had originated in part with San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins, who had written on social media that if federal agents “come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents … I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”

OAKLAND — President Trump said Thursday that he had called off a planned federal “surge” into San Francisco after speaking with Mayor Daniel Lurie and other city leaders — a detente that officials and activists in the East Bay said they were not welcomed into and viewed with some suspicion, as potentially enlarging the target on their own communities.

Trump’s announcement came amid protests at the entrance to the U.S. Coast Guard base across the bay in Alameda County, where the Department of Homeland Security has begun staging additional forces. It followed a similar announcement by Lurie, who said he had told Trump during a phone call late Wednesday that San Francisco is “on the rise” and that “having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery.”

Lurie said Trump agreed to call off any federal deployment to the city, and that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — who is in charge of federal immigration forces — had “reaffirmed that direction” in a conversation with him Thursday morning.

Trump said on social media that his administration had been planning a “surge” in San Francisco beginning Saturday, but that Lurie had asked him “very nicely” to “give him a chance to see if he can turn it around,” and that other “friends” of Trump’s in the city had asked him to call it off because they believe Lurie is “making substantial progress.”

Trump said he told Lurie that he was “making a mistake, because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove,” but that he had ultimately agreed to pause the surge — in part because Lurie has the support of prominent business leaders Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.

During a Thursday morning briefing less than an hour after Trump’s post, Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee and other East Bay leaders said they had “no information” about such a stand-down in their communities, and were still bracing for increased federal immigration raids given the staging of forces at nearby Coast Guard Island, which is in the waters between Alameda and Oakland.

“The federal administration, of course, has escalated its rhetoric and its enforcement posture in the Bay Area. We know that Border Patrol agents are being stationed on Coast Guard Island,” Lee said. “But … we are fully prepared. We’re monitoring developments closely and we’ll keep our residents informed if there are any confirmed changes. Oakland is and will continue to be a welcoming city for our immigrants and our refugees.”

The Department of Homeland Security defended the deployment of its agents to the region, saying they would be “targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens — including murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles, and terrorists.”

Alameda County Dist. Atty. Ursula Jones Dickson said the staging of immigration forces in the East Bay was part of an established Trump administration “playbook” to rile up communities with immigration actions and then use any unrest to justify further force — and called on East Bay residents not to fall for it.

“We know that they’re baiting Oakland, and that’s why San Francisco, all of a sudden, is off the table,” Jones Dickson said. “So I’m not going to be quiet about what we know is coming. We know that their expectation is that Oakland is going to do something to cause them to make us the example.”

Lourdes Martinez, co-director of the immigrant rights program at Centro Legal de la Raza, said communities are understandably scared given recent legal rulings that federal immigration agents can stop people based on factors such as the color of their skin, the language they are speaking and the job sectors they work in — and organizers expect more such stops given the latest deployments.

She called on immigrants and others to protect themselves by readying documentation and making sure that they and their families are familiar with their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney — and how to contact legal advocacy groups in case of trouble. She also urged community members to report any detentions, to “make sure that nobody disappears.”

“We know this is an uncertain and stressful time. However, this is a moment of unity and power, not panic,” she said.

Shortly after Lee’s event, about 40 protesters gathered near a bridge leading to Coast Guard Island.

Music was blasting. One person wore a blow-up animal costume, a trend that gained momentum amid similar protests in Portland recently. Coast Guard members in tactical gear stood in a line across from protesters who screamed at them.

“We knew there was going to be [an immigration enforcement] presence here and we wanted to disrupt in a peaceful way — to make it harder for them to abduct people,” said Lindsey Swanson, 32, a financial planner who lives in Oakland.

Swanson and others said they believed immigration enforcement would also ramp up in San Francisco, despite Trump and Lurie’s morning assurances, and would continue in the East Bay regardless.

“There’s East Bay — Oakland, Berkeley — so calling off San Francisco means nothing,” said Rachel Kim, a 28-year-old Berkeley resident who is training to become a therapist.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Trump’s conversation with Lurie was an example of how he is willing to work with Democrats and other states to “do the right thing and clean up America’s cities.”

“He is genuinely interested in this effort to make our streets safer, to make our cities safe and clean again,” she said.

The morning events followed days of growing tensions in the Bay Area over Trump’s plans for the region, after he repeatedly suggested that he would send federal forces into San Francisco — which he called a “mess” in desperate need of help, despite data showing decreasing crime and homeless encampments and surging positive sentiment.

On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed the staging of immigration agents in the area, and suggested it was the first move in a broader effort by Trump and his administration to stoke chaos and intimidate residents in yet another liberal part of the country.

“He sends out masked men, he sends out Border Patrol, he sends out ICE, he creates anxiety and fear in the community so that he can lay claim to solving that by sending in the Guard,” Newsom said. “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”

The response echoed those of leaders and activists in other cities where immigration forces and federal troops have been deployed, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Portland. It added to an already rancorous debate around Trump’s mass deportation initiative, which he campaigned on heavily, and the role of federal forces in American cities — something the founders of the nation limited to extreme circumstances.

Central to that debate has been Trump’s repeated and unprecedented decision to repeatedly send troops into American cities without the explicit support of state or local leaders. Federal judges have been divided on that issue, though it has so far been allowed to continue in Los Angeles by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

But even in the appellate court, there has been tense disagreement.

Liberal judges on the court recently called for the decision allowing the deployments to continue in Los Angeles, which was made by a three-judge panel, to be reheard before a larger, 11-judge panel. When that request was denied, several dissented Wednesday — excoriating the deployments as a clear breach of constitutional law and the separation of powers.

Judge Marsha Berzon, in a dissent joined by 10 fellow 9th Circuit judges, wrote that the smaller panel in its preliminary deference to Trump had “invited presidents, now and in the future, to deploy military troops in response to the kinds of commonplace, shortlived, domestic disturbances whose containment conventionally falls to local and federal law enforcement units.”

Times staff writer Ana Ceballos, in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

The Trump administration is sending federal agents to San Francisco following weeks of threats from the president to deploy the National Guard to the Bay Area.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom released a statement on X confirming and criticizing the agents’ upcoming arrival. He called deployment a “page right out of the dictator’s handbook” intended to create the conditions of unrest necessary to then send in the National Guard.

“He sends out masked men, he sends out Border Patrol, he sends out ICE, he creates anxiety and fear in the community so that he can lay claim to solving that by sending in the [National] Guard,” said Newsom. “This is no different than the arsonist putting out the fire.”

Around 100 federal agents, including members of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, are en route to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Alameda base, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle. The Coast Guard and DHS did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Trump has suggested for weeks that San Francisco is next on his list for National Guard deployment, after the administration sent troops to Los Angeles and Chicago and is battling in court to send them to Portland, Ore.

On Sunday, Trump told Fox News, “We’re going to San Francisco and we’ll make it great. It’ll be great again.”

Trump has suggested that the role of the National Guard in San Francisco would be to address crime rates. However, the National Guard is generally not allowed to perform domestic law enforcement duties when federalized by the president.

In September, he said that cities with Democratic political leadership such as San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles “are very unsafe places and we are going to straighten them out.”

Trump said he told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training for our military, our national guard.”

Newsom urged Californians to remain peaceful in the face of the arrival of federal agents.

“President Trump and [White House Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller’s authoritarian playbook is coming for another of our cities, and violence and vandalism are exactly what they’re looking for to invoke chaos,” said Newsom on X.

The sending of federal agents to San Francisco comes as the Trump administration continues to crack down on immigration across the nation in an attempt to carry out what the president has proclaimed is the largest deportation effort in U.S. history.

Nancy Pelosi’s plan to seek reelection extends one of San Francisco’s longest-running, most-fevered political guessing games: Who will succeed the Democrat when she finally does step aside?

The announcement Tuesday by the 81-year-old congresswoman was utterly predictable. Her decision augurs an election that will be thoroughly pro forma.

Pelosi will attract, as she always does, at least one candidate running to her left, who will insist — in true San Francisco fashion — that she is not a real Democrat. There will also be a Republican opponent or two, who may raise many millions of dollars from Pelosi haters around the country acting more out of spite than good sense.

And then, in just about nine months, she will be handily reelected to Congress for an 18th time.

Nob Hill may crumble. Alcatraz may tumble. But Pelosi, who hasn’t bothered running anything remotely resembling a campaign in decades, will not be turned out by her constituents so long as she draws a breath and stands for election.

There was speculation she might step aside and not run again. But Pelosi knows better than anyone the power and influence — not to mention prodigious fundraising capacity — that would diminish the moment she indicated the rest of the year would be spent marking time to her departure.

In an October 2018 interview, while campaigning in Florida ahead of the midterm election that returned her to the speakership, Pelosi allowed as how she didn’t envision staying in office forever. (It was a signal to those impatient Democrats in the House that their aspirations wouldn’t die aborning and helped her secure the votes she needed to retake the gavel.)

“I see myself as a transitional figure,” Pelosi said at a downtown Miami bistro. “I have things to do. Books to write; places to go; grandchildren, first and foremost, to love.”

But, she quickly added, she wasn’t imposing a limit on her tenure. “Do you think I would make myself a lame duck right here over this double espresso?” Pelosi said with a raised eyebrow and a laugh.

She won’t, of course, live forever, and so for many years there has been speculation — and some quiet jockeying — over who will eventually take Pelosi’s place.

To say her seat in Congress is coveted is like suggesting there’s a wee bit of interest in the city in a certain sporting event this weekend. (For those non-football fans, the San Francisco 49ers will be playing the Rams in the NFC championship game for a ticket to the Super Bowl.)

In nearly 60 years, just three people have served in the seat Pelosi now holds. Two of them — Phil Burton and Pelosi — account for all but a handful of those years. Burton’s widow, Sala, served about four years before, as she lay dying, she anointed Pelosi as her chosen replacement.

So succeeding Pelosi could be the closest thing to a lifetime appointment any San Francisco politician will ever enjoy. And given all the pent-up ambition, there is no shortage of prospective candidates.

One of the strongest contenders is state Sen. Scott Wiener, 51, who has built an impressive record in Sacramento in a district that roughly approximates the current congressional boundaries.

Another prospect is Christine Pelosi, 55, the most politically visible of the speaker’s five children and a longtime activist in Democratic campaigns and causes. If she ran, to what length — if any — would the speaker go in hopes of handing off the seat to her daughter?

Republicans seem exceedingly likely to win control of the House in November. It seems exceedingly unlikely that Pelosi would happily settle into the role of minority leader, much less fall back as a workaday member of a shrunken, enfeebled Democratic caucus.

Would she time her departure to benefit her daughter by, say, requiring a snap election that would take advantage of Pelosi’s brand name? Or would she avoid choosing sides and allow the election to play out in San Francisco’s typically brutal, free-for-all fashion?

The intrigue continues.

SAN FRANCISCO — About 24 hours after President Trump declared San Francisco such a crime-ridden “mess” that he was recommending federal forces be sent to restore order, Manit Limlamai, 43, and Kai Saetern, 32, rolled their eyes at the suggestion.

The pair — both in the software industry — were with friends Thursday in Dolores Park, a vibrant green space with sweeping views of downtown, playing volleyball under a blue sky and shining autumn sun. All around them, people sat on benches with books, flew kites, played with dogs or otherwise lounged away the afternoon on blankets in the grass.

Both Limlamai and Saetern said San Francisco of course has issues, and some rougher neighborhoods — but that’s any city.

“I’ve lived here for 10 years and I haven’t felt unsafe, and I’ve lived all over the city,” Saetern said. “Every city has its problems, and I don’t think San Francisco is any different,” but “it’s not a hellscape,” said Limlamai, who has been in the city since 2021.

Both said Trump’s suggestion that he might send in troops was more alarming than reassuring — especially, Limlamai said, on top of his recent remark that American cities should serve as “training grounds” for U.S. military forces.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate at all,” he said. “The military is not trained to do what needs to be done in these cities.”

Across San Francisco, residents, visitors and prominent local leaders expressed similar ideas — if not much sharper condemnation of any troop deployment. None shied away from the fact that San Francisco has problems, especially with homelessness. Several also mentioned a creeping urban decay, and that the city needs a bit of a polish.

But federal troops? That was a hard no.

A range of people on Market Street in downtown San Francisco on Thursday.

“It’s just more of [Trump’s] insanity,” said Peter Hill, 81, as he played chess in a slightly edgier park near City Hall. Hill said using troops domestically was a fascist power play, and “a bad thing for the entire country.”

“It’s fascism,” agreed local activist Wendy Aragon, who was hailing a cab nearby. Her Latino family has been in the country for generations, she said, but she now fears speaking Spanish on the street given that immigration agents have admitted targeting people who look or sound Latino, and troops in the city would only exacerbate those fears. “My community is under attack right now.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said troop deployments to the city were “completely unnecessary” and “typical Trump: petty, vindictive retaliation.”

“He wants to attack anyone who he perceives as an enemy, and that includes cities, and so he started with L.A. and Southern California because of its large immigrant community, and then he proceeded to cities with large Black populations like Chicago, and now he’s moving on to cities that are just perceived as very lefty like Portland and now San Francisco,” Wiener said.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, defended such deployments and noted crime reductions in cities, including Washington, D.C., and Memphis, where local officials — including D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat — have embraced them.

“America’s once great cities have descended into chaos and crime as a result of Democrat policies that put criminals first and law-abiding citizens last. Making America Safe Again — especially crime-ridden cities — was a key campaign promise from the President that the American people elected him to fulfill,” Jackson said. “San Francisco Democrats should look at the tremendous results in DC and Memphis and listen to fellow Democrat Mayor Bowser and welcome the President in to clean up their city.”

A police officer shuts the door to his car after a person was allegedly caught carrying a knife near a sign promoting an AI-powered museum exhibit in downtown San Francisco.

A presidential ‘passion’

San Francisco — a bastion of liberal politics that overwhelmingly voted against Trump in the last election — has been derided by the conservative right for generations as a great American jewel lost to destructive progressive policies.

With its tech-heavy economy and downtown core hit hard by the pandemic and the nation’s shift toward remote work, the city has had a particularly rough go in recent years, which only exacerbated its image as a city in decline. That it produced some of Trump’s most prominent political opponents — including Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris — has only made it more of a punching bag.

In August, Trump suggested San Francisco needed federal intervention. “You look at what the Democrats have done to San Francisco — they’ve destroyed it,” he said in the Oval Office. “We’ll clean that one up, too.”

Then, earlier this month, to the chagrin of liberal leaders across the city, Marc Benioff, the billionaire Salesforce founder and Time magazine owner who has long been a booster of San Francisco, said in an interview with the New York Times that he supported Trump and welcomed Guard troops in the city.

“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff said, just as his company was preparing to open its annual Dreamforce convention in the city, complete with hundreds of private security officers.

The U.S. Constitution generally precludes military forces from serving in police roles in the U.S.

On Friday, Benioff reversed himself and apologized for his earlier stance. “Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” he wrote on X.

He also apologized for “the concern” his earlier support for troops in the city had caused, and praised San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, for bringing crime down.

Billionaire Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, also called for federal intervention in the city, writing on his X platform that downtown San Francisco is “a drug zombie apocalypse” and that federal intervention was “the only solution at this point.”

Trump made his latest remarks bashing San Francisco on Wednesday, again from the Oval Office.

Trump said it was “one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago,” but “now it’s a mess” — and that he was recommending federal forces move into the city to make it safer. “I’m gonna be strongly recommending — at the request of government officials, which is always nice — that you start looking at San Francisco,” he said to leading members of his law enforcement team.

Trump did not specify exactly what sort of deployment he meant, or which kinds of federal forces might be involved. He also didn’t say which local officials had allegedly requested help — a claim Wiener called a lie.

“Every American deserves to live in a community where they’re not afraid of being mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted or shot, and that’s exactly what our administration is working to deliver,” Trump said, before adding that sending federal forces into American cities had become “a passion” of his.

Kai Saetern, 32, was playing volleyball in Dolores Park on Thursday. Saetern said he has never felt unsafe living in neighborhoods all over the city for the last 10 years.

Crime is down citywide

The responses from San Francisco, both to Benioff and Trump, came swiftly, ranging from calm discouragement to full-blown outrage.

Lurie did not respond directly, but his office pointed reporters to his recent statements that crime is down 30% citywide, homicides are at a 70-year low, car break-ins are at a 22-year low and tent encampments are at their lowest number on record.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Lurie said. “But I trust our local law enforcement.”

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins was much more fiery, writing online that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had turned “so-called public safety and immigration enforcement into a form of government sponsored violence against U.S. citizens, families, and ethnic groups,” and that she stood ready to prosecute federal officers if they harm city residents.

Attendees exit the Dreamforce convention downtown on Thursday in San Francisco.

“If you come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents … I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day,” she said.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) — whose seat Wiener is reportedly going to seek — said the city “does not want or need Donald Trump’s chaos” and will continue to increase public safety locally and “without the interference of a President seeking headlines.”

Newsom said the use of federal troops in American cities is a “clear violation” of federal law, and that the state was prepared to challenge any such deployment to San Francisco in court, just as it challenged such deployments in Los Angeles earlier this year.

The federal appellate court that oversees California and much of the American West has so far allowed troops to remain in L.A., but is set to continue hearing arguments in the L.A. case soon.

Trump had used anti-immigration enforcement protests in L.A. as a justification to send troops there. In San Francisco, Newsom said, he lacks any justification or “pretext” whatsoever.

“There’s no existing protest at a federal building. There’s no operation that’s being impeded. I guess it’s just a ‘training ground’ for the President of United States,” Newsom said. “It is grossly illegal, it’s immoral, it’s rather delusional.”

Nancy DeStefanis, 76, a longtime labor and environmental activist who was at San Francisco City Hall on Thursday to complain about Golden Gate Park being shut to regular visitors for paid events, was similarly derisive of troops entering the city.

“As far as I’m concerned, and I think most San Franciscans are concerned, we don’t want troops here. We don’t need them,” she said.

Passengers walk past a cracked window from the Civic Center BART station in downtown San Francisco.

‘An image I don’t want to see’

Not far away, throngs of people wearing Dreamforce lanyards streamed in and out of the Moscone Center, heading back and forth to nearby Market Street and pouring into restaurants, coffee shops and take-out joints. The city’s problems — including homelessness and associated grittiness — were apparent at the corners of the crowds, even as chipper convention ambassadors and security officers moved would-be stragglers along.

Not everyone was keen to be identified discussing Trump or safety in the city, with some citing business reasons and others a fear of Trump retaliating against them. But lots of people had opinions.

Sanjiv, a self-described “techie” in his mid-50s, said he preferred to use only his first name because, although he is a U.S. citizen now, he emigrated from India and didn’t want to stick his neck out by publicly criticizing Trump.

He called homelessness a “rampant problem” in San Francisco, but less so than in the past — and hardly something that would justify sending in military troops.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “It’s not like the city’s under siege.”

Claire Roeland, 30, from Austin, Texas, said she has visited San Francisco a handful of times in recent years and had “mixed” experiences. She has family who live in surrounding neighborhoods and find it completely safe, she said, but when she’s in town it’s “predominantly in the business district” — where it’s hard not to be disheartened by the obvious suffering of people with addiction and mental illness and the grime that has accumulated in the emptied-out core.

“There’s a lot of unfortunate urban decay happening, and that makes you feel more unsafe than you actually are,” she said, but there isn’t “any realistic need to send in federal troops.”

She said she doesn’t know what troops would do other than confront homeless people, and “that’s an image I don’t want to see.”

Times staff writer Dakota Smith contributed to this report.

Comedians Kumail Nanjiani and Ilana Glazer dropped out of performing at Salesforce’s annual tech conference this week after the company’s chief executive Marc Benioff made controversial remarks that showed his support for President Trump.

Last week, Benioff told the New York Times he thought Trump should deploy the National Guard to reduce crime in San Francisco, comments that sparked backlash from Silicon Valley philanthropists and Democrats.

On Friday, Benioff completely walked back his remarks and apologized.

“I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” he wrote on social media site X. “My earlier comment came from an abundance of caution around the event, and I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused.”

Salesforce, a software company based in San Francisco, provides a platform that businesses use to manage customer data and track sales. The company confirmed the comedians dropped out but the entertainers haven’t said publicly what prompted the last-minute cancellation. A source close to the company told the San Francisco Chronicle that Nanjiani became ill and that led to his scheduled opener Glazer to cancel as well.

Nanjiani and Glazer haven’t publicly spoken out about Benioff’s remarks about the National Guard.

Both comedians, though, have been critical of Trump in the past and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Earlier this year, Glazer spoke at a “No Kings” protest, which organizers say is to meant fight back against authoritarian policies pushed by Trump and his administration. This week, she promoted the next series of demonstrations, scheduled to take place on Oct. 18, stating it wasn’t a partisan issue on Instagram.

The San Francisco Standard reported earlier on the cancellation.

Benioff has grappled with a growing backlash since he made comments about Trump and the National Guard. The controversy overshadowed Dreamforce, a conference in San Francisco that featured well-known speakers including tech executives, government officials and entertainers.

Nanjiani played Dinesh in the HBO series “Silicon Valley” and co-wrote and starred in the Oscar-nominated 2017 film “The Big Sick.” Glazer co-created and starred in the Comedy Central series “Broad City” and the 2024 comedy film “Babes.”

In their absence, comedian David Spade performed at Dreamforce on Thursday afternoon, closing out the conference.

Ahead of the event, which ended on Thursday, Benioff appeared to dial back his remarks.

On social media site X, he said he was trying to make a point about making the conference as safe as possible.

“Keeping San Francisco safe is, first and foremost, the responsibility of our city and state leaders,” he wrote on X. Benioff also said he’s donating an extra $1 million to fund larger hiring bonuses for new police officers.

Benioff, who has previously said he’s an independent and was once a Republican, has backed Democrats and supported liberal causes such as a business tax for homeless services. But he’s also been critical of public safety in San Francisco and has threatened to move Dreamforce from San Francisco to Las Vegas.

The conference brings nearly 50,000 people to the city, generates $130 million in revenue for San Francisco and creates 35,000 local jobs, according to Salesforce. The company announced earlier this week it was investing $15 billion in San Francisco over five years to advance artificial intelligence.

On Thursday, prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Democratic donor Ron Conway resigned from the Salesforce Foundation board. In an email first viewed by the New York Times, Conway told Benioff that he “now barely recognize the person I have so long admired.”

“Your obsession with and constant annual threats to move Dreamforce to Las Vegas is ironic, since it is a fact that Las Vegas has a higher rate of violent crime than San Francisco,” Conway wrote in the email. “San Francisco does not need a federal invasion because you don’t like paying for extra security for Dreamforce.”

Conway, founder and managing partner of SV Angel, is widely regarded as the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” because of his early investments in major tech companies such as Google, Facebook and PayPal. SV Angel didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Salesforce spokesperson said in a statement they have “deep gratitude for Ron Conway and his incredible contributions to the Salesforce Foundation Board for over a decade.”

On Friday, entrepreneur and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs published an essay in the Wall Street Journal citing some of Benioff’s earlier remarks and claims that no one has given more to San Francisco. The widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs also founded and heads the philanthropic organization, Emerson Collective.

“The message beneath that comment was unmistakable: In his eyes, generosity is an auction—and policy is the prize awarded to the highest bidder,” she wrote. “But giving that expects control is anything but generous.”

After Contreras’ offensive coordinator, Carlos Trujillo, did his work on Friday night during his team’s 39-14 win over Hollywood, he was picked up by car and whisked off to Los Angeles International Airport to take a red-eye flight to Chicago so he could complete the 11th marathon of his life.

“I will never be crazy enough to do one,” Contreras head coach Manuel Guevara said.

Running 26.2 miles is pretty challenging, but Trujillo has found something he enjoys, and players admire his commitment.

“The entire varsity [team] wished him good luck,” Guevara said. “It teaches the kids that coaches challenge themselves in different ways.”

He’ll be back for practice on Tuesday as Contreras (4-3, 2-0) prepares for a key Central League game against Bernstein on Thursday night.

Trujillo, 43, said he started running marathons when he was head coach at North Hollywood. He has run marathons in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas and New York besides Chicago.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

Marc Benioff has become the latest Silicon Valley tech leader to signal his approval of President Trump, saying that the president is doing a great job and ought to deploy the National Guard to deal with crime in San Francisco.

The Salesforce chief executive’s comments came as he headed to San Francisco to host his annual Dreamforce conference — an event for which he said he had to hire hundreds of off-duty police to provide security.

“We don’t have enough cops, so if they [National Guard] can be cops, I’m all for it,” he told The New York Times from aboard his private plane.

The National Guard is generally not allowed to perform domestic law enforcement duties when federalized by the president.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s use of National Guard soldiers in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act — which restricts use of the military for domestic law enforcement — and ordered that the troops not be used in law enforcement operations within California.

Trump has also ordered the National Guard to deploy to cities such as Portland, Ore., and Chicago, citing the need to protect federal officers and assets in the face of ongoing immigration protests. Those efforts have been met with criticism from local leaders and are the subject of ongoing legal battles.

President Trump has yet to direct troops to Northern California, but suggested in September that San Francisco could be a target for deployment. He has said that cities with Democratic political leadership such as San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles “are very unsafe places and we are going to straighten them out.”

“I told [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training for our military, our national guard,” Trump said.

Benioff’s call to send National Guard troops to San Francisco drew sharp rebukes from several of the region’s elected Democratic leaders.

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins said she “can’t be silent any longer” and threatened to prosecute any leaders or troops who harass residents in a fiery statement on X.

“I am responsible for holding criminals accountable, and that includes holding government and law enforcement officials too, when they cross the bounds of the law,” she said. “If you come to San Francisco and illegally harass our residents, use excessive force or cross any other boundaries that the law prescribes, I will not hesitate to do my job and hold you accountable just like I do other violators of the law every single day.”

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) also took to X to express indignation, saying “we neither need nor want an illegal military occupation in San Francisco.”

“Salesforce is a great San Francisco company that does so much good for our city,” he said. “Inviting Trump to send the National Guard here is not one of those good things. Quite the opposite.”

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office offered a more muted response, touting the mayor’s efforts to boost public safety in general, but declining to directly address Benioff’s remarks.

Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the mayor, noted that the city is seeing net gains in both police officers and sheriff’s deputies for the first time in a decade. He also highlighted Lurie’s efforts to bring police staffing up to 2,000 officers.

“Crime is down nearly 30% citywide and at its lowest point in decades,” Lutvak said. “We are moving in the right direction and will continue to prioritize safety and hiring while San Francisco law enforcement works every single day to keep our city safe.”

When contacted by The Times Friday night, the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who vociferously opposed the deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, did not issue a comment in response to Benioff.

Benioff and Newsom have long been considered friends, with a relationship dating back to when Newsom served as San Francisco’s mayor. Newsom even named Benioff as godfather to one of his children, according to the San Francisco Standard.

Benioff has often referred to himself as an independent. He has donated to several liberal causes, including a $30-million donation to UC San Francisco to study homelessness, and has contributed to prior political campaigns of former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Hillary Clinton.

However, he has also donated to the campaigns of former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain, both Republicans, and supported tougher-on-crime policies and reducing government spending.

Earlier this year, Benioff also praised the Elon Musk-led federal cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

“I fully support the president,” Benioff told the New York Times this week. “I think he’s doing a great job.”

The singer D4vd called off a series of upcoming tour dates, including a concert this weekend at Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre, as police investigate his connection to the death of a teenage Inland Empire girl whose decomposed body was discovered this month in a car registered to the musician.

A representative for the Greek said the show, which was scheduled for Saturday night, had been canceled. Other tour dates in San Francisco and in Europe had either been removed from or were listed as canceled on Ticketmaster’s website by Friday afternoon.

An event at L.A.’s Grammy Museum scheduled for Wednesday — in which D4vd planned to perform and to take part in a conversation about his work — has also been called off. A representative for D4vd didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, D4vd, 20, announced that he would release a deluxe edition of his 2025 album, “Withered,” on Friday, but the project hadn’t appeared on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music by Friday morning.

Police are investigating the singer’s ties to Celeste Rivas, who was reported missing in April 2024 and whose whereabouts were a mystery until this week, when authorities identified her remains after they found a body in the trunk of a Tesla in a Hollywood tow lot on Sept. 8.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday signed a sweeping package of climate and environment bills aimed at reducing the cost of electricity, stabilizing gasoline prices and propping up California’s struggling oil industry.

At a bill signing ceremony at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Newsom told state lawmakers and representatives from labor, business, climate and energy groups that the package was a compromise, designed to push California toward a clean-energy future while still ensuring the state has enough affordable gasoline to meet drivers’ needs.

“Everybody recognized this moment and worked together across their differences, which were not insignificant,” Newsom said.

The bills signed into law include an extension of the state’s nation-leading cap-and-trade program through 2045. The program, rebranded as cap-and-invest, limits greenhouse gas emissions and raises billions for the state’s climate priorities by allowing large polluters to buy and sell their unused emission allowances at quarterly auctions.

The cap-and-invest program should funnel up to $60 billion through 2045 into lowering utility bill costs for California households and small businesses during months when prices spike, officials said. Another $20 billion will go toward the state’s trudging high-speed rail project, and $12 billion to public transit.

California’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen 20% since 2000, while the state’s gross domestic product increased 78% over the same time period, Newsom’s office said.

The most controversial bill in the package was SB 237, which will allow oil and gas companies to drill up to 2,000 new wells per year through 2036 in Kern County, the heart of California oil country. The bill effectively circumvents a decade of legal challenges by environmental groups seeking to stymie drilling in the county that produces about three-fourths of the state’s crude oil.

Some environmentalists fumed over that trade-off, as well as over a provision that will allow the governor to suspend the state’s summer-blend gasoline fuel standards — which reduce emissions but drive up costs at the pump — if prices spike for more than 30 days or if it seems likely that they will.

That bill was introduced as part of an effort to stabilize volatile gas prices as Valero and Phillips 66 prepare to close refineries in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County’s South Bay that represented an estimated 20% of the state’s refining capac ity.

Environmental groups said the bills still represent progress, particularly as the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress step away from clean energy policy.

“D.C. has not led,” said Katelyn Roedner Sutter, the California state director for the Environmental Defense Fund. “California will.”

Through AB 825, California is also laying the groundwork for an electricity market among Western states. The bill is designed to make it easier to share solar and wind power across state lines, meaning California can export excess solar energy while importing wind energy from gustier places like New Mexico and Wyoming.

“Today is a big win for the Golden State,” said state Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg). “If you pay utility bills and you want them lower, you win. If you drive a car and hate gas price spikes, you win. If you want clean drinking water, you win. If you want to breathe clean air, you win today. It’s a pretty big winner’s circle.”

Comics have long been on the front lines of democracy, the canary in the cat’s mouth, Looney Tunes style, when it comes to free speech being swallowed by regressive politics.

So Jimmy Kimmel is in good company, though he may not like this particular historical party: Zero Mostel; Philip Loeb; even Lenny Bruce, who claimed, after being watched by the FBI and backroom blacklisted, that he was less a comic and more “the surgeon with the scalpel for false values.”

During that era of McCarthyism in the 1950s (yes, I know Bruce’s troubles came later), America endured an attack on our 1st Amendment right to make fun of who we want, how we want — and survived — though careers and even lives were lost.

Maybe we aren’t yet at the point of a new House Un-American Activities Committee, but the moment is feeling grim.

Wake up, Los Angeles. This isn’t a Jimmy Kimmel problem. This is a Los Angeles problem.

This is about punishing people who speak out. It’s about silencing dissent. It’s about misusing government power to go after enemies. You don’t need to agree with Kimmel’s politics to see where this is going.

For a while, during Trump 2.0, the ire of the right was aimed at California in general and San Francisco in particular, that historical lefty bastion that, with its drug culture, openly LBGTQ+ ethos and Pelosi-Newsom political dynasty, seemed to make it the perfect example of what some consider society’s failures.

But really, the difficulty with hating San Francisco is that it doesn’t care. It’s a city that has long acknowledged, even flaunted, America’s discomfort with it. That’s why the infamous newspaper columnist Herb Caen dubbed it “Baghdad by the Bay” more than 80 years ago, when the town had already fully embraced its outsider status.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, has never considered itself a problem. Mostly, we’re too caught up in our own lives, through survival or striving, to think about what others think of our messy, vibrant, complicated city. Add to that, Angelenos don’t often think of themselves as a singular identity. There are a million different L.A.s for the more than 9 million people who live in our sprawling county.

But to the rest of America, L.A. is increasingly a specific reality, a place that, like San Francisco once did, embodies all that is wrong for a certain slice of the American right.

It was not happenstance that President Trump chose L.A. as the first stop for his National Guard tour, or that ICE’s roving patrols are on our streets. It’s not bad luck or even bad decisions that is driving the push to destroy UCLA as we know it.

And it’s really not what Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk that got him pulled, because it truth, his statements were far from the most offensive that have been uttered on either side of the political spectrum.

In fact, he wasn’t talking about Kirk, but about his alleged killer and how in the immediate aftermath, there was endless speculation about his political beliefs. Turns out that Kimmel wrongly insinuated the suspect was conservative, though all of us will likely have to wait until the trial to gain a full understanding of the evidence.

“The MAGA gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said, before making fun of Trump’s response to the horrific killing.

You can support what Kimmel said or be deeply offended by it. But it is rich for the people who just a few years ago were saying liberal “cancel culture” was ruining America to adopt the same tactics.

If you need proof that this is more about control than content, look no further than Trump’s social media post on the issue, which directly encourages NBC to fire its own late-night hosts, who have made their share of digs at the president as well.

“Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” Trump wrote.

This is about making an example of America’s most vibrant and inclusive city, and the celebrity icons who dare to diss — the place that exemplifies better than any other what freedom looks like, lives like, jokes like.

If a Kimmel can fall so easily, what does that mean the career of Hannah Einbinder, who shouted out a “free Palestine” at the Emmys? Will there be a quiet fear of hiring her?

What does it mean for a union leader like David Huerta, who is still facing charges after being detained at an immigration protest? Will people think twice before joining a demonstration?

What does it mean for you? The yous who live lives of expansiveness and inclusion. The yous who have forged your own path, made your own way, broken the boundaries of traditional society whether through your choices on who to love, what country to call your own, how to think of your identity or nurture your soul.

You, Los Angeles, with your California dreams and anything-goes attitude, are the living embodiment of everything that needs to be crushed.

I am not trying to send you into an anxiety spiral, but it’s important to understand what we stand to lose if civil rights continue to erode.

Kimmel having his speech censored is in league with our immigrant neighbors being rounded up and detained; the federal government financially pressuring doctors into dropping care for transgender patients, and the University of California being forced to turn over the names of staff and students it may have a beef with.

Being swept up by ICE may seem vastly different than a millionaire celebrity losing his show, but they are all the weaponization of government against its people.

It was Disney, not Donald Trump, who took action against Kimmel. But Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatening to “take action” if ABC did not sounds a lot like the way the White House talks about Washington, Oakland and so many other blue cities, L.A. at the top of the list.

Our Black mayor. Our Latino senator and representatives. Our 1 million undocumented residents. Our nearly 10% of the adult population identifies as LGBTQ+. Our comics, musicians, actors and writers who have long pushed us to see the world in new, often difficult, ways.

Many of us are here because other places didn’t want us, didn’t understand us, tried to hold us back. (I am in Sacramento now, but remain an Angeleno at heart.) We came here, to California and Los Angeles, for the protection this state and city offers.

But now it needs our protection.

However this assault on democracy comes, we are all Jimmy Kimmel — we are all at risk. The very nature of this place is under siege, and standing together across the many fronts of these attacks is our best defense.

Seeing that they are all one attack — whether it is against a celebrity, a car wash worker or our entire city — is critical.

“Our democracy is not self-executing,” former President Obama said recently. “It depends on us all as citizens, regardless of our political affiliations, to stand up and fight for the core values that have made this country the envy of the world.”

So here we are, L.A., in a moment that requires fortitude, requires insight, requires us to stand up and say the most ridiculous thing that has every been said in a town full of absurdity:

I am Jimmy Kimmel, and I will not be silent.

John L. Burton, the proudly liberal and pro-labor lawmaker who shaped California politics and policy over six decades on topics as varied as welfare, foster care, auto emissions, guns and foie gras, has died. He was 92.

With his brother, Rep. Phillip Burton, and college buddy, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Burton was integral to the organization that dominated Democratic politics in San Francisco and the state starting in the 1960s.

Burton was elected to the Assembly in 1964 and Congress a decade later. Laid low by cocaine addiction, he did not seek reelection in 1982. But he returned to Sacramento after getting clean and became the Capitol’s most powerful legislator as Senate president pro tem from 1998 until term limits forced him to retire in 2004.

“I think government’s there to help the people who can’t help themselves. And there’s a lot of people that can’t help themselves,” Burton said, describing his view of a politician’s job in an oral history interview by Open California.

Burton’s death was confirmed in a statement released by his family on Sunday.

“He cared a lot,” said Kimiko Burton, his daughter. “He always instilled in me that we fight for the underdog. There are literally millions of people whose lives he helped over the years who have no idea who he is.”

An L.A. Times writer described Brown, always dapper and cool, as a piece of living art. In contrast, Burton was performance art — rumpled, often rude, too fidgety to sit in long policy meetings. Some people sprinkle conversation with profanities. Burton doused his sentences with expletives, usually F-bombs.

John Burton with then-California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2011.

(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

He was quick to yell but could also be charming. He bought pies from a fruit stand off Interstate 80 between San Francisco and Sacramento and delivered them as apologies to targets of his rants. An aide once gave him a T-shirt with the phrase: “I yell because I care.”

Unlike most politicians, who dress to the nines, Burton wore ties reluctantly and showed up at meetings with governors wearing guayaberas, rarely with his hair in place. When cameras weren’t around, he drove through San Francisco delivering blankets to homeless people.

One of Burton’s many intensely loyal aides was Angie Tate, whom he hired to be his political fundraiser in 1998 knowing she was pregnant with twins. After she gave birth three months early and tried to return to work, Burton insisted that she take a year off, fully paid. She worked with him for the rest of his days.

In later years, he created John Burton Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit group to mentor foster youth and seek policy changes. One such bill extended services for foster youth until age 21, rather than the previous cutoff of 18.

“I don’t think there is a person who has done more for foster kids than John Burton,” said Miles Cooley, a Los Angeles entertainment attorney who was in foster care when he was a child and sits on the board of Burton’s foundation. “He wasn’t speaking truth to power. He was yelling it.”

From his early days in public life, Burton, a lawyer and Army veteran, advocated for greater civil rights, opposed the death penalty, and was an antiwar activist, protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam in October 1963, when the U.S. had fewer than 17,000 troops there.

As state Senate leader four decades later, Burton joined folk singer Joan Baez at a protest of President George W. Bush’s impending invasion of Iraq. As California Democratic Party chair from 2009 to 2017, he presided as the party changed its platform to oppose capital punishment.

“John Burton was liberal when it was popular to be liberal and he was liberal when it was not popular. I always admired that,” said former state Sen. Jim Brulte, a Republican who tangled with Burton in the Legislature and later when they chaired their respective political parties.

A party chair’s job is to win elections. That requires money. In 2008, the year before Burton took over the state Democratic Party, the California Republican and Democratic parties raised and spent roughly equal sums. By 2016, his final campaign as chair, the Democrats were outspending the Republicans $36.2 million to $17.7 million.

He promoted a ballot measure in 2010 that allows the Legislature to pass the annual budget by a simple majority rather than the previous two-thirds supermajority, allowing the Democrats to pass a legislative session’s most important measure — the budget — without Republican votes, further marginalizing the GOP in Sacramento.

When Burton stepped down from the California Democratic Party in 2017, Democrats held all statewide offices and had supermajorities in both houses of the 120-seat Legislature.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), then-Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis and state Treasurer Fiona Ma were among the politicians, most of them women, who joined Burton on the convention stage in 2017 for his farewell as party chair. Former state Sen. Martha Escutia serenaded him with a rendition of “Bésame Mucho.”

“John is the chief architect of the Democrats’ dominance in California,” Pelosi said at the time.

Burton paid tribute to the people who had helped him, saying, “You’re only as good as your staff,” and closed by exhorting party loyalists to raise their middle fingers and give a Burton-like cheer to then-President Trump.

Although Burton was a partisan, his closest friend in the Senate was Ross Johnson of Fullerton, who was Senate Republican leader. Sharing a quirky love of song, the unlikely duet interrupted a Senate floor session with a rendition of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

They also shared a distrust of authority and collaborated to curb law enforcement’s ability to seize individuals’ assets without a trial. Burton and Johnson shaped campaign finance law with a ballot measure permitting political parties to accept unlimited donations, enhancing parties’ power. As a sweetener for voters, the measure required rapid disclosure of contributions.

John Lowell Burton, born in Cincinnati in 1932, was the youngest of three brothers. After his father completed medical school in Chicago, the family relocated to San Francisco, where Dr. Burton cared for patients whether they could pay or not.

Burton lettered in basketball at San Francisco State College and kept a clipping of a newspaper box score showing he scored 20 points against a University of San Francisco team that included young Bill Russell, one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He met Brown at San Francisco State and they became lifelong friends. A bartender in his younger days, Burton was arrested for bookmaking in 1962, but was cleared.

Burton credited his oldest brother, Phillip, with pushing him to enter politics. A dominant political figure, Rep. Phil Burton might have become House speaker if he had not died in 1983 at the age of 56.

The Burton brothers reflected a dichotomy in California politics, rising from the left while Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan ascended from the right, against the swirl of the Bay Area’s brand of radical politics. John Burton and Brown won their Assembly seats in 1964, the same year that voters approved a ballot measure backed by the real estate industry giving property owners the right to refuse to sell to people of color. Courts later overturned it.

The Burton-Brown organization spawned a who’s who of leaders, including two San Francisco mayors — George Moscone, who was a high school friend, and Brown, the most powerful Assembly speaker in California history. Burton was a friend of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s father, a state appellate court justice, and watched young Gavin’s high school sports games. Brown gave Newsom his start in politics with an appointment.

Barbara Boxer worked for John Burton during his time in Congress, before succeeding him in 1982 and winning a U.S. Senate seat a decade later. When Boxer retired in 2016, Brown helped promote Boxer’s successor, Kamala Harris.

Pelosi is most consequential of all. Phillip Burton’s widow, Sala Burton, succeeded him in Congress. As she was dying of cancer, Sala Burton told John that she wanted Pelosi to succeed her, and he used all his connections to help Pelosi win the congressional seat in 1987.

Outgoing California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton at the California Democratic State Convention in 2017.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

In November 1978, Burton declined an invitation from Rep. Leo Ryan, a Democrat from San Mateo, to accompany him to Guyana to investigate the People’s Temple cult, once a force in San Francisco politics. On Nov. 18, as Ryan’s plane was about to depart with cult defectors, one of cult leader Jim Jones’ followers assassinated the congressman. Jones led a murder-suicide resulting in more than 900 deaths.

On Nov. 27, 1978, with the city convulsed by the Jonestown cataclysm, Dan White, a former San Francisco supervisor, sneaked into City Hall and assassinated Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

Burton fell hard in the months and years after, drinking heavily, huffing nitrous oxide and freebasing cocaine. He missed congressional votes, and aides feared he would be found dead. In 1982, he checked into a rehab facility in Arizona and did not seek reelection.

Back in San Francisco, he built a law practice, stayed clean and returned to politics, winning a special election for an open Assembly seat in 1988. He reunited with Speaker Brown and became his close ally.

Burton’s eclectic circle of friends included national political figures, Hollywood glitterati, football coach John Madden, North Beach topless dancer Carol Doda and, from his bartending days, Alice Kleupfer, a cocktail waitress.

In this small world, Kleupfer’s son James Rogan won an Assembly seat from the Burbank area as a Republican in 1994, was elected to Congress in 1996, and helped lead the impeachment of President Clinton. Politics aside, Burton and Rogan shared a connection through Kleupfer.

That friendship mattered on May 30, 1996, when Republicans, holding a short-lived 41-39 seat advantage in the Assembly, rushed to approve tough-on-crime bills. One bill would have made it a crime for pregnant women to abuse drugs, a response to accounts of babies born addicted to cocaine. The GOP-led Assembly seemed certain to pass it when Burton stood to speak.

Though not a commanding orator, Burton spoke from the heart about how cocaine “takes total control of your life,” and how he spent days freebasing in hotel rooms, refusing maid service because he didn’t want anyone to see him.

“It took me, somebody who at least has got a fair set of brains sometimes, who comes from a background that is not deprived, who at the time I was doing it — and I’m not proud to say — was a member of the House of Representatives, and it took me two years to get off this drug, which is the most insidious drug you can imagine,” Burton said.

Floor speeches rarely change minds. But after Burton pleaded with Republicans not to “turn these young women into criminals,” Rogan, then-Speaker Curt Pringle and a few other Republicans withheld their votes. With the bill pending, Republicans conferred behind closed doors and quietly dropped the bill.

“It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t scripted. It was pure John Burton,” said Rogan, who went on to become a Superior Court judge in Orange County. Burton was the only Democrat who had the relationships and gravitas to derail the bill.

For most of his time in office, Burton served under Republican governors. He butted heads with them and on occasion won them over.

When young Assemblyman Burton sought to decriminalize marijuana, Reagan, implying that Burton was a nut, quipped that the San Franciscan was the one man in Sacramento who had the most to fear from the squirrels that populate Capitol Park. Burton answered by calling reporters to the park and trying to feed squirrels a copy of some Reagan-backed legislation.

“There’s some benefit to people thinking you’re nuts,” Burton said in an interview.

Though he was a relatively junior legislator, Burton took a lead role in Reagan’s 1971 welfare overhaul, pushing for annual cost-of-living adjustments for welfare recipients, something he fought to protect over the years.

He disparaged Gov. Pete Wilson, a Marine Corps veteran, for his efforts to limit welfare by calling him “the little Marine.” Burton had a “wicked sense of humor and a “colorful” way of expressing it” but was “a straight shooter,” Wilson said.

“With respect to legislative leaders, as Democrats, I would say that the combination of John Burton and Willie Brown negotiating budget and policy solutions during a time of crisis in the Reagan Cabinet Room was some of the finest policy and political talent California has ever seen,” Wilson said.

Voters elected Burton to the state Senate in 1996, and senators elected him Senate president pro tem in 1998, the year Gray Davis was elected governor, the first Democrat to hold that office after 16 years of Republicans. The relationship was strained.

In appearance, temperament and approach, they were opposites, and they clashed. Davis was a centrist who tried to be tightfisted. Burton, often dismissive of Davis, tried to pull him to the left. When it suited their interests, however, Davis signed legislation that Burton advocated, and Burton carried administration legislation.

“It ain’t brain surgery,” Burton said in 2021 of the art of turning a bill into a law. But few legislators could handle a lawmaking scalpel like Burton.

As Senate leader, he shepherded legislation to buy the last large stands of old-growth redwoods, increase public employee pensions, restrict guns and expand the right to sue, including for victims of sexual harassment. He was the target of such a suit in 2008. It was settled a few months later.

Burton routinely blocked legislation that increased the length of prison sentences but was a favorite of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., which represents prison guards. He was, after all, pro-labor.

In 2002, Burton carried legislation ratifying the prison officers’ contract negotiated by the Davis administration granting officers a raise of roughly 35% over five years, and boosting their pensions. Later that year the union, run by the fedora-wearing Don Novey, celebrated Burton’s 70th birthday by donating $70,000 to his campaign account.

Often, Burton sought no credit for what he helped others accomplish, as Fran Pavley discovered. In 2001, her first year in the Assembly, Pavley, an Agoura Hills Democrat, proposed far-reaching climate change legislation to authorize the California Air Resources Board to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle tailpipes.

Lobbyists for automakers shifted into overdrive, airing ads warning California that AB 1058 would dictate what cars people could own. The oil industry, drive-time talk radio hosts, and even Cal Worthington and his dog Spot piled on. AB 1058 looked like roadkill.

Burton’s solution: Hijack another bill and insert the contents of Pavley’s bill into it. With that bit of legerdemain, AB 1058 died, AB 1493 was born, and the auto industry’s campaign crashed.

Burton didn’t attend the ceremony when Davis signed the bill. Nor did he accompany Pavley a decade later when President Obama held a Rose Garden ceremony embracing the California concept in nationwide fuel-efficiency standards.

Pavley said she had never seen a politician work so hard for a bill for no credit, ”and I haven’t seen it since.”

Burton took special interest in certain issues. He was, for example, appalled at the force-feeding of ducks and geese to enlarge their livers to produce foie gras. In one of his final bills, he battled restaurant owners and agricultural interests to ban the practice. It passed the Senate by one vote.

In a letter urging Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign the bill against the wishes of some chefs, he included Burtonesque doggerel: “Save Donald Duck. F— Wolfgang Puck.”

Schwarzenegger signed the bill and sent Burton a photo of himself and Burton in the governor’s office looking at the bottom of the governor’s shoe with a note: “I got duck liver on my shoe!” In the background of the photo, there’s an image of Reagan, smiling with his head tilted back as if he’s having a good laugh.

Burton, who was divorced twice, is survived by his daughter, attorney Kimiko Burton, and two grandchildren.

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.

Morain is a former Times staff writer.

President Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Ore., to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data show most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years.

Homicides through the first six months of 2025 were down significantly compared with the same period in 2024, continuing a post-pandemic trend across the U.S.

Trump, who has already taken federal control of police in Washington, D.C., has maligned the six Democratic-run cities that all are in states that opposed him in 2024. But he hasn’t threatened sending in the Guard to any major cities in Republican-leaning states.

John Roman, a data expert who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the University of Chicago, acknowledged violence in some urban neighborhoods has persisted for generations. But he said there’s no U.S. city where there “is really a crisis.”

“We’re at a remarkable moment in crime in the United States,” he said.

Public sees things differently

Trump might be tapping somewhat into public perception when he describes cities such as Chicago as a “killing field.” The vast majority of Americans, 81%, see crime as a “major problem” in large cities, according to a survey released this week by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, though there is much less support, 32%, for federal control of police.

The public was reminded this week that shootings remain a frequent event in the U.S. In Minneapolis, which has seen homicides and most other crime fall, a shooter killed two children attending a Catholic school Mass on Wednesday and wounded 17 a day after three people died in separate shootings elsewhere in the city.

Still, over time, the picture is encouraging, according to numbers from AH Datalytics, which tracks crimes across the country using law enforcement data for its Real-Time Crime Index.

Aggravated assaults — which includes nonfatal shootings — through June were down in Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Baltimore and San Francisco and were virtually unchanged in New York. Reports of rape were up in New York and Chicago during the first half of the year, but down in the other cities, including a 51% drop in San Francisco.

The crime index also showed that property crimes, such as theft, burglary and motor vehicle theft, were mostly down in those six cities in the first six months of 2025. Theft crimes rose from 2020-24 in four of the six cities analyzed by AP.

Cities defend safety strategies

Trump exaggerated and misstated facts about crime in Washington when his administration took over the D.C. police department and flooded the capital with federal agents and the National Guard. He referred to Baltimore, 40 miles away, as a “hellhole” during a Cabinet meeting and has said he might “send in the ‘troops.’ ”

“I’m not walking in Baltimore right now,” Trump said.

Yet Baltimore has shown drops in major crime, according to the crime index. Homicides and rapes were down 25% or more in the first half of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. Homicides were down for three consecutive years through 2024 and were 35% lower when compared with 2018.

“Deploying the National Guard for municipal policing purposes is not sustainable, scalable, constitutional, or respectful,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said on social media site X.

Baltimore has found ways to reduce violence by offering mentorship, social services and job opportunities to young people likely to commit crimes, said Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at Arizona State University and a former police chief in Florida.

“That approach has resulted in more significant reductions in shootings and homicides than any other strategy I’ve seen in the over 50 years I’ve been in the field,” Scott said.

Vice President JD Vance told a Wisconsin crowd on Thursday that governors and mayors should ask the Trump administration for help.

“The president of the United States is not going out there forcing this on anybody,” Vance said of using the National Guard, “though we do think that we have the legal right to clean up America’s streets if we want to.”

Tales of different cities

Trump doesn’t seem to disparage big cities in states that favor Republicans. Charlotte, N.C., had 105 homicides in 2024 compared with 88 in 2023. The rate of vehicle thefts per 100,000 people more than doubled there from 2020-24. Indianapolis had a homicide rate of 19 per 100,000 residents in 2024 — more than four times higher than New York’s.

Amy Holt, 48, who recently moved to Charlotte from a gated community in northern Virginia, said someone tried to steal her husband’s car in their new city. She also found bullets on the ground while walking with dogs.

There’s no discussion about sending the National Guard to Charlotte. Holt believes most cities should be trusted to be in charge of public safety, adding that troops in uniforms would be “alarming” and “scary.”

Democratic-elected officials in cities targeted by Trump have publicly rejected suggestions that their residents need the National Guard. “Crime is at its lowest point in decades, visitors are coming back, and San Francisco is on the rise,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said.

Experts question just how effective the National Guard would be and where troops would be deployed in cities.

“It’s going to make residents think: Things must be much worse than I realize to have the military in my neighborhood. What’s going on?” Scott said. “It’s more likely to generate undue fear and apprehension than it will lead to perceptions of reassurance and safety.”

White and Keller write for the Associated Press. White reported from Detroit and Keller reported from Albuquerque, N.M. AP video journalist Erik Verduzco in Charlotte, N.C., contributed to this report.

Maybe you’ve heard about San Francisco’s doom loop. But have you met its jumbo nude?

As just about any San Franciscan could tell you, “doom loop” is shorthand for the city’s post-pandemic troubles. Many of those worries stem from dwindling demand for office space, but would-be visitors have also been nervous about crime and withering retail energy.

That brings us to the jumbo nude. It’s a 45-foot, semi-translucent sculpture of a woman now standing at the foot of Market Street, officially named R-Evolution. Not everyone loves her, but she is one among many new or improved elements attracting locals and visitors these days.

Even with San Francisco’s office vacancy rate hovering around 35%, the sun keeps rising and visitors keep smiling, most of them, much of the time.

Make your way to the city and you can see major park upgrades at the Presidio and Ocean Beach. Or you can frolic among massive balloon installations, vintage photo booths and ‘60s artifacts in permanent and pop-up places that bill themselves as museums.

There’s also the prospect of a new “bay lights” show with 50,000 illumination points on the Bay Bridge. (Those lights were supposed to be on by now, but installation snags led to a delay; organizers say they’re hoping to be ready “sometime this fall.”)

Also, the food doesn’t hurt. When our critic Bill Addison chose 101 of his favorite California restaurants recently, 35 of them were in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, crime has been falling since early 2023, especially this year. Tourist arrivals are 11% behind 2019 but have grown steadily since 2021.

As this list attests, there’s plenty to see. But first, we should talk about a few places not on this list.

One is Fisherman’s Wharf. It has added a SkyStar Ferris wheel (which migrated from Golden Gate Park in 2023) and the Port of San Francisco says it will soon begin a big redevelopment, but the area remains dominated by T-shirt shops and multiple old-school restaurants that have been shuttered since the pandemic. The neighborhood was to have added a Museum of Failure this year but, not kidding, the enterprise collapsed amid an intellectual property dispute before opening. The storefront “failure” sign was still up in June, creating the snarkiest photo op ever.

Another mixed bag is Union Square, whose hotels, department stores and passing cable cars have made it the starting point for legions of tourists through the decades. The square is still pleasant by day, with young visitors drawn to assorted free games (ping-pong, badminton, cornhole) while cable cars pass, tourists line up for Big Bus tours and guests at the adjacent Beacon Grand Hotel (formerly the Sir Francis Drake) explore the neighborhood. But many key retailers have shuttered, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom, and Macy’s will follow. (The company has said it will close as soon as it finds a buyer for the property.)

“We feel safe here. But kind of disappointed by all the closures,” said Melinda Parker, visiting San Francisco with her husband from Boise. Also, Parker said, “a city should be judged on the quality of its public toilets. They have one here, and it’s closed.”

Still, there are more than enough bright spots to light up a San Francisco visit. Let’s go back for a second to Tunnel Tops, one of the city’s recently improved park spaces. You grab a snack, commandeer a patio table and gaze upon the Presidio and Golden Gate. A family debate erupts over whether to hit a museum next or try an urban hike. This is a sort of problem, but a nice choice to have. And San Francisco now offers plenty like that.

The Dodgers are counting on Max Muncy to be ready to produce in October.

As they should.

Muncy is expected to be sidelined for six weeks with a bone bruise in his left knee but that won’t push them into the market for another third baseman between now and the July 31 trade deadline.

“I don’t think that changes much, knowing the certainty of Max coming back at some point,” manager Dave Roberts said.

The faith in Muncy is justified by his track record, the former All-Star missing three months last year but setting an all-time playoff record by reaching base in 12 consecutive plate appearances on the team’s World Series run.

This doesn’t mean the Dodgers shouldn’t be looking to strike a major deal over the next three-plus weeks.

They still have to address their greatest obstacle to become their sport’s repeat champions in 25 years. They still have to address their starting pitching.

Every sign points to the Dodgers taking a passive approach in dealing with the issue, as they continue to point to the anticipated returns of Tyler Glasnow and Blake Snell.

Glasnow pitched 4 ⅓ innings for triple-A Oklahoma City on Thursday and Roberts said he expected the 6-foot-8 right-hander to rejoin the rotation on the Dodgers’ upcoming trip to Milwaukee and San Francisco.

Dodgers pitcher Tyler Glasnow throws in the outfield before a game against the New York Mets at Dodger Stadium on June 4.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Snell pitched to hitters in live batting practice on Wednesday and is scheduled to do so again on Saturday. The left-hander could be on a minor-league rehabilitation assignment by next week.

Glasnow and Snell are former All-Stars, but how much can the Dodgers rely on them?

Unironically nicknamed “Glass,” Glasnow hasn’t pitched since April. The $136.5-million man has never pitched more than the 134 innings he pitched last year, and even then, he wasn’t unavailable for the playoffs.

Snell made just 20 starts last year with the San Francisco Giants but was signed by the Dodgers to a five-year, $182-million contract over the winter. He made only two starts for them before he was placed on the injured list with shoulder inflammation.

Dodgers pitcher Blake Snell throws the ball against the Atlanta Braves at Dodger Stadium on April 2.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Ideally, the Dodgers’ postseason rotation would consist of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Snell, Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani. There’s no guarantee that will materialize, considering that Yamamoto and Ohtani have their own complicated medical histories.

Yamamoto pitched heroically in the playoffs last year but only after missing three months in the regular season. Ohtani returned from his second elbow reconstruction last month but has been used as an opener so far. Ohtani is expected to pitch two innings on Saturday against the Houston Astros, and the team doesn’t envision using him for more than four or five innings at a time in the playoffs.

Every pitcher is an injury risk, and the Dodgers know that. But just because they won the World Series last year with three starting pitchers — they resorted to bullpen games when Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty and Walker Buehler couldn’t pitch — doesn’t mean they can lean as heavily on their relievers and expect the same results. The approach has resulted in more postseason disappointments than championships, so much so that when Ohtani was being recruited by the Dodgers before last season, Mark Walter told him he considered his previous 12 years of ownership to be a failure.

Ohtani will celebrate his 31st birthday on Saturday. He might not be showing his age yet, but Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts have. Freeman will be 36 in September and Betts 33 in October. The window in which the Dodgers have three MVP-caliber players in the lineup is closing, which should inspire a sense of urgency.

The front office’s reluctance to shop in a seller’s market is understandable, considering the most attractive possibilities are by no means sure things. Chris Sale of the Atlanta Braves is on the 60-day injured list with a fractured rib. Sandy Alcantara of the Miami Marlins has been up and down in his return from Tommy John surgery. Then again, the Dodgers made a smart buy in Flaherty last year and the gamble resulted in a World Series.

At this point, it’s up to Glasnow and Snell to perform well enough to convince the Dodgers they don’t need any more pitching. Until Glasnow and Snell do that, the team should operate as if it has to do something.

NEW YORK — The monthlong celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride reached its crescendo as New York and other major cities in the U.S. and around the world hosted parades and marches Sunday.

Pride celebrations are typically a daylong mix of jubilant street parties and political protest, but this year’s iterations took a more defiant stance as Republicans, led by President Trump, have sought to roll back LGBTQ+ rights.

The theme of the festivities in Manhattan was “Rise Up: Pride in Protest.” San Francisco’s Pride theme was “Queer Joy Is Resistance,” while Seattle’s was simply “Louder.”

Lance Brammer, a 56-year-old teacher from Ohio attending his first Pride parade in New York, said he felt “validated” as he marveled at the size of the city’s celebration, the nation’s oldest and largest.

“With the climate that we have politically, it just seems like they’re trying to do away with the whole LGBTQ community, especially the trans community,” he said, wearing a vivid, multicolored shirt. “And it just shows that they’ve got a fight ahead of them if they think that they’re going to do that with all of these people here and all of the support.”

Doriana Feliciano, who described herself as an LGBTQ+ ally, held up a sign saying, “Please don’t lose hope,” in support of friends she said couldn’t attend Sunday.

“We’re in a very progressive time, but there’s still hate out there, and I feel like this is a great way to raise awareness,” she said.

Manhattan’s parade wound its way down Fifth Avenue with more than 700 participating groups greeted by huge crowds. The rolling celebration will pass the Stonewall Inn, the famed Greenwich Village gay bar where a 1969 police raid triggered protests and energized the LGBTQ+ rights movement.

The site is now a national monument. The first Pride march was held in New York City in 1970 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

Later Sunday, marchers in San Francisco, host to another of the world’s largest Pride events, planned to head down Market Street to concert stages set up at the Civic Center Plaza. San Francisco’s mammoth City Hall is among the venues hosting a post-march party.

Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Toronto were among the other major North American cities hosting Pride parades on Sunday.

Several global cities including Tokyo, Paris and São Paulo held their events earlier this month, and others come later in the year, including London in July and Rio de Janeiro in November.

Since taking office in January, Trump has issued orders and implemented policies targeting transgender people, removing them from the military, preventing federal insurance programs from paying for gender-affirmation surgeries for young people and attempting to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ and women’s sports.

Peter McLaughlin said he’s lived in New York for years but had never attended the Pride parade. The 34-year-old Brooklyn resident said he felt compelled this year as a transgender man.

“A lot of people just don’t understand that letting people live doesn’t take away from their own experience, and right now it’s just important to show that we’re just people,” McLaughlin said.

Gabrielle Meighan, 23, of New Jersey, said she felt it was important to come out to this year’s celebrations because they come days after the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark June 26, 2015, ruling in Obergefell vs. Hodges that recognized same-sex marriage nationwide.

“It’s really important to vocalize our rights and state why it’s important for us to be included,” she said.

Manhattan on Sunday also hosted the Queer Liberation March, an activism-centered event launched in recent years amid criticism that the more mainstream parade had become too corporate.

Marchers holding signs that included “Gender affirming care saves lives” and “No Pride in apartheid” headed north from the city’s AIDS Memorial to Columbus Circle near Central Park.

Among the other headwinds faced by gay rights groups this year is the loss of corporate sponsorship. American companies have pulled back support of Pride events, reflecting a broader walking back of diversity and inclusion efforts amid shifting public sentiment.

NYC Pride said this month that about 20% of its corporate sponsors dropped or reduced support, including PepsiCo and Nissan. Organizers of San Francisco Pride said they lost the support of five major corporate donors, including Comcast and Anheuser-Busch.

Marcelo and Shaffrey write for the Associated Press.