If you live in the Bay Area, as I do, the last 48 hours have been really wild.

First, the facts:

*On Wednesday (October 22) we learned that Trump was ordering a full-fledged military “surge” (i.e. invasion) of the Bay Area, with ICE, Border Patrol, FBI and National Guard involvement. And someone leaked that the staging area was a Coast Guard base with only one road in and out.

*On Thursday morning, several hundred people gathered at the bridge to the base to make it clear that ICE, etc. are not welcome here. Despite violence by Border Patrol, the demonstrators remained disciplined and peaceful and prevented all traffic coming or leaving the base.

*On Thursday afternoon, Trump publicly announced he was pulling the plug on the surge, and stated he had done so because of lobbying by his tech. bro billionaire allies, especially Steve Benioff.

Now the lessons as I see them:

*The protest at the Coast Guard base was a clear signal that the entire Bay Area was ready to mobilize at once and massively to protest the surge. I can certainly say that I felt a very palpable tension on Wednesday and Thursday morning everywhere I went. A Wednesday night organizing call had over 5000 participants.

*The long history of progressive politics in the Bay Area guarantees that every elected official in the region opposes Trump and the threatened surge. In the face of this threat, the Mayors of San Francisco and Oakland as well as San Francisco Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Governor Newsom all pledged to prosecute federal agents for crimes against civilians.

*The Bay Area is the home to an important sector of Trump’s sycophants, the techies. Trump cares what they think because they have lavishly funded him and he has deregulated AI research and crypto, which benefits them.  The techies opposed the militarization of the Bay Area because the resulting protests and chaos would directly affect them. When Steve Benioff (Salesforce) publicly called for Trump to send troops to San Francisco two weeks ago, he found out the cost: the head of the Benioff Foundation quit, and anti-Trump billionaires in Silicon Valley as well as Bay Area politicians of every stripe criticized him. A few days later, he apologized for his mistake.

*The mayor of San Francisco, Dan Lurie, is heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, with deep ties to Silicon Valley billionaires. He was perfectly positioned to organize the tech bros. to pressure Trump to recant and did so.   

*Trump cares more about his relationship with billionaires than with his fake “war on crime” and “war on immigrants.” He knows that the military surge is all for show, just to convince his base that he is really a tough guy who is Making America Great. But to pull back publicly after announcing the surge was a defeat for Trump.

*This does not mean that ICE is leaving the Bay. Their kidnappings and terrorist raids will continue throughout the region. Vigilance and resistance will still be needed. This was only one skirmish in a much bigger conflict. But what Trump had in mind was a qualitatively greater show of force aimed at bullying and cowing the Bay Area. Stopping that really does matter.

The main lesson: resistance works. It starts with community-level organizing and rapid mobilization of large numbers of people, which the Bay Area has demonstrated it is very capable of doing over and over again since the 1930s.  Second, resistance is most effective when a section of the ruling elite decide it is in their own interest to take our side. The mayors of both San Francisco and Oakland opposed the surge and pledged to use local police to arrest federal agents if they committed crimes against civilians. The tech billionaires openly opposed Trump. Trump backed off.

This is what happened in the Bay Area in 48 hours. Of course, Trump’s brutal politics will continue, and even today (Saturday, October 25) ICE has been seen in Oakland’s most important Latino neighborhood (Fruitvale) intimidating people a week before Dios de los Muertos.

Stopping Trump’s surge, even if temporarily, was just one small victory. But there are useful lessons to be learned from even a small win.