This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
One of the most significant and consequential differences between Donald Trump’s first term and his reelection concerned his relationship with Silicon Valley’s top moneymakers. While Trump had a few such folks on hand in 2016 (e.g., Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Balaji Srinivasan), he had difficulty earning other industry leaders’ consistent support. It didn’t help that the president weaponized his administration’s powers against companies he didn’t like, such as Amazon and Facebook, and publicly disparaged cryptocurrencies as being “based on thin air.” After the Capitol insurrection, even his staunchest tech-world supporters seemed more inclined to place their hopes in Ron DeSantis, who’d hoped to turn his “anti-woke” Florida into a refuge from California liberalism.
But things changed. The Biden administration began trust-busting Big Tech, prosecuting crypto crimes, and hiking interest rates, while DeSantis proved to be a real meatball. Rich techies like Elon Musk grew more resentful in the COVID era as offices shut down, employees protested on behalf of feminist and social justice causes, and global economic weirdness disrupted the move-fast-and-break-things business ethos, which had been better suited for the postrecession, zero-interest-rate period. (And then there are those who just want to say demeaning things without fear of social pushback.) Most tech guys may have previously voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, but now Donald Trump didn’t seem so bad after all—at least, not for their pocketbooks.
This disaffected executive class, including many of Thiel’s fellow VCs and “PayPal Mafia” alumni, began to influence Trump’s campaign. They fundraised for the candidate and persuaded him to do things like change his mind on crypto, pick Thiel mentee J.D. Vance as his running mate, and give their own weirdo-libertarian political theories around government shrinkage and tech accelerationism a bit more consideration. The effort began paying off right after Trump won, with Crypto.com’s Kris Marszalek and Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse—whose company is represented by a lobbying firm that once employed two incoming Trump administration appointees—meeting with the president-elect to pitch him on their ideas. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, one of this election cycle’s most potent fundraisers, will be joining a presidential dinner during the inauguration. As Trump recently put it: “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”
Undoubtedly, the right wing of the tech world has already gained more political influence than it ever had before. Musk and former biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy are heading up a “department” named after a memecoin, and some of Musk’s pals, like frequent Mar-a-Lago guest Marc Andreessen and disgraced ex–Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, are helping recruit for the effort, urging friends and CEOs to advise their efforts for free. Meanwhile, the president-elect runs his own crypto fund and has announced an official White House crypto council, to be headed up by PayPal Mafioso David Sacks and failed congressional candidate Bo Hines. Bitcoin maximalist Kevin O’Leary is also advising Trump on the whole “annexing Canada” thing.
Trump has already been more than happy to give all these guys what they want when it comes to both his formal and informal staff. His picks to head the treasury (Scott Bessent), the Commerce Department (Howard Lutnick), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (Paul Atkins) have already been praised by this very brain trust as champions of crypto. Bessent endorsed Trump’s idea of a strategic bitcoin reserve, and industry lobbyist Atkins has promised to lay off the lawsuits and regulations. Lutnick, meanwhile, manages a fund that holds most of the shares for the crypto industry’s most essential (and sketchiest) dollar-backed asset, the stablecoin Tether.
It’s also striking how many of Trump’s appointees have either direct or secondary connections with Peter Thiel, the antidemocratic neoreactionary who recently penned a Financial Times op-ed parroting conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and comparing other nations’ social media regulations to “Orwellian dictatorships.” There’s David Sacks as “White House A.I. and Crypto czar,” former Thiel business partner Michael Kratsios as Office of Science and Technology Policy director, ex–Thiel Foundation Director Jim O’Neill at Health and Human Services, and PayPal alum Ken Howery as ambassador to Denmark. (You can bet that he’ll eagerly wish to pursue Trump’s dream of annexing Greenland.)
But it’s not just patronage driving these appointments—it’s concerted ideology. These right-wing techies all share a hostility to government regulation at any level, a desire to run the White House like a startup, a vision of global American tech hegemony, and a firm conviction that what’s best for Silicon Valley’s wallets is what’s best for the world.
The most self-serving, venal, greedy, and entitled members of Silicon Valley are hoping to reshape American governance in their image, with the help of a willing and pliant Trump. The enshittification of America has begun.
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