JD Vance is an obvious, bald-faced opportunist. It makes sense that Trump would pick him as his Vice Presidential candidate; they probably understand each other quite well.
It can’t have hurt that a bevy of tech billionaires told Trump to pick him, and it’s not unreasonable to assume they gated funding on that choice. Elon Musk has pledged to give $45 million a month to a PAC newly formed to back Trump; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, former Yammer founder David Sacks, and VC Chamath Palihapitiya have also raised money for the group. Eponymous Andreessen-Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pledged donations and Keith Rabois has also reportedly pledged a comparatively paltry $1 million. (The Winkelvoss twins are also donors, but I wouldn’t exactly call them Silicon Valley insiders.)
Andreessen explained why, saying that the future of America is at stake:
Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains is what Andreessen called “the final straw” that forced him to switch from supporting the current president to voting for Trump. If the unrealized capital gains tax goes into effect, startups may have to pay taxes on valuation increases. (Private companies’ appreciation is not liquid. However, the U.S. government collects tax in dollars.)
One could argue, of course, that the future of America is at stake. As The 19th reported about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s suggested plan for a next Trump administration whose authors include over 140 people who were a part of the last one:
Much of Project 2025 relates to gender, sexuality and race, aiming to end most all of the federal government’s efforts to achieve equity and even collect data that could be used to track outcomes across the public and private sectors.
The other sweeping changes it proposes include firing civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists, removing the Department of Education, gutting our already-insufficient climate change protections, reinstating the military draft, conducting sweeping immigration raids and mass deportations, and condemning more people to death sentences while making them swift enough to avoid retrial.
All this despite being on shaky legal ground:
Some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are divided about whether Trump can politicize the civil workforce to fire them at will, for example. And the plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally iffy.
Trump has lately distanced himself from the plan in public, but privately said something quite different at a Heritage Foundation dinner:
“This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do, and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”
For his part, Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, said out loud on Steve Bannon’s podcast:
We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
JD Vance is walking this line too. My employer, ProPublica, recently reported that he, among other things, believes that the Devil is real, and that he had some unpleasant things to say about trans people:
He said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and “point out the obvious,” including that “there are real biological, cultural, religious, spiritual distinctions between men and women.” He added, “I think that’s what the whole transgender thing is about, is like fundamentally denying basic reality.”
So, yes, all things considered, it feels a bit like America is in the balance.
What’s particularly bald about involvement from the Silicon Valley crowd is that they are, according to them, overlooking all of this and concentrating solely on their business interests. If policies like a tax on unrealized capital gains or tighter anti-trust actions are enacted, those investors may have to re-think some of their investment strategies.
For what it’s worth, those taxes are only applicable for individuals with a net worth of over $100M, with payments at an automatic minimum tax rate treated as prepayments against future realized gains. The effect could actually be to encourage startups to go public and realize their value sooner, which wouldn’t be a terrible thing for the ecosystem (but might limit the heights private valuations can reach). Given that people with that level of worth don’t usually make taxable income, this new levied tax on investment gains makes sense as a way to encourage the very wealthy to pay the same sorts of tax rates as the rest of us — but, clearly, Musk, Thiel, et al feel differently. (Invasive thought: where’s Sacks and Palihapitiya’s podcast co-host Jason Calacanis on this? Is he a sympathizer or just an enabler?)
Do tighter regulations and a new minimum tax for the wealthy risk the future of America, though? Maybe they have a different definition of America than I do. If, to them, it’s a place where you can make a bunch of money without oversight or accountability, then I can see how they might be upset. If, on the other hand, America is a place where immigrants are welcome and everyone can succeed, and where everyone has the freedom to be themselves, all built on a bedrock of infrastructure and support, then one might choose to take a different view. The tax proposal at hand is hardly socialism; it’s more like a correction. Even if you accept their premise, single-issue voting when the other issues include mass deportations and gutting public education is myopically self-serving, leave alone the barren inhumanity of leaving vulnerable communities out to dry.
Responses by prominent Republican supporters to the inclusion of a Sikh prayer in Punjabi in the Republican National Convention — one line reading, “in your grace and through your benevolence, we experience peace and happiness” — lay bare what the unhinged Christian nationalist contingent believes in:
Andrew Torba, CEO of the far-right social media platform Gab, ranted to his 400,000 followers on X, “Last night you saw why Christian Nationalism must be exclusively and explicitly Christian. No tolerance for pagan false gods and the synagogue of Satan.” Republican Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers seemed to agree. “Christians in the Republican party nodding silently along to a prayer to a demon god is shameful,” he posted.
From my perspective, there are no upsides to a Trump win. Even if you accept the idea that Project 2025 has nothing to do with him (which, as I’ve discussed, is laughable), his own self-published Agenda 47 for his next administration is similarly horrible, and includes provisions like sending the National Guard into cities, destroying climate crisis mitigations, mass deportations, and removing federal funding for any educational institution that dares to teach the history of race in America. It also includes a version of Project 2025’s call to fire civil servants who are seen as disloyal. JD Vance wants to end no-fault divorce(ironically, given his running mate), trapping people in abusive relationships. The effects on the judicial system from his first administration will be felt for generations; a second administration will be similarly seismic. He will gut support for vulnerable communities. I have friends who will directly suffer as a result of his Presidency; he will create an America that I do not want to bring my son up in.
Silicon Valley is supposed to invent the future. That’s what’s so inspiring about it: for generations, it’s created new ways of sharing and working that have allowed people to communicate and work together wherever they are. These new moves make it clearer than ever that a portion of it has never believed in that manifesto; that it is there solely to establish itself as a new set of power-brokers, trying to remake the world in their own image. The rest of us need to oppose them with our full voices and everything we can muster.