JD Vance Is the Loyal Convert in Chief
Thiel, the founder of Palantir and colleague of the so-called Paypal Mafia alongside Musk, financed a large part of the Vance Senate race in 2022.
He is perhaps the most mysterious and dreaded of the billionaire vance allies in the Trump administration, the source that served the first time telling me. And they are happy to see less of him in relation to when he played a more active and conventional role as a donor in 2016, in particular by delivering a discourse to the National Republican Convention, where he deplored how “instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East”.
In Trumpworld, Thiel now gets the merit of having “lowered her head”. (“Now, does that mean that he withdrew from politics,” they say, “or have retired from public policy?”)
Thiel did not return a comment request.
The man holding the cards
Although Vance has partially established its brand in the party as a criticism of “Big Tech” – including a distrust around data collection, a call to repeal section 230, and even a desire to violate certain companies under the antitrust law – its arrival on the ticket and subsequently in the White House brought with a vision of the world and links with a network of limited editors for the comfortable pas.
“The base still has a hint of technology, and Steve Bannon is a good symbol,” said a Trumpworld source close to the president. “There is always this high level of suspicion with technological crowd, technology technologies.”
“JD continues to keep these cards with the tech bros,” said the source close to Trump.
“I think he has only grown in force, to the point where, we have an election in 2028 and I think he is the favorite, but is there even a list of challengers at the moment?” The former Trump administration official adds.
Some Trumpworld sources have noted that the role of vance as an ambassador of libertarian technology law and its eccentric financiers was largely the result of a cash tightening confronted with the Trump campaign as the general elections of 2024 approaches.
Vance turned out to be the right man at the right time, the source close to Trump tells me by recalling what they describe as a “perfect storm” of factors in favor of Vance this time. “At that time, [Trump] I realized that you had to do something else.
It is not because the figures of Silicon Valley supported Trump that they have their ear directly, at least not all the time. Larry Ellison, the billionaire executive president of Oracle, the expected American buyer from Tiktok, has met Trump several times in private in recent weeks. But Marc Andreessen, the billionaire investor and former software engineer who wrote manifests during his free time, acquired a reputation in Trumpworld to play his relationship with Trump too much after spending time in Mar-A-Lago to work on the verification of staff during the transition, said a Senior Wired source of administration. Since then, Trump has not spoken to Andreessen “as much”, told me the source. Andreessen, one of the best opinion leaders on the right of technology and the influences on the wing of the Silicon Valley of the Party, exercises its influence “by the vice-president, mainly”, says the source of the senior administration.
