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Important news about money and politics in the race for the White House
Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, has called on tech billionaire Peter Thiel to “come off the sidelines” and help fund the Republican race for the White House as the party tries to raise money to defeat Kamala Harris.
Vance made the plea to Thiel, his former Silicon Valley boss, in an interview with the Financial Times in Wisconsin, one of the battleground states that will determine the outcome of November’s presidential election.
Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has been reluctant to back any candidates in this year’s election, despite donating to Republican campaigns in 2016 and backing Vance’s 2022 bid for U.S. Senate.
“I’m going to keep talking to Peter and trying to convince him. He’s obviously a little tired of politics, but if we lose and Kamala Harris becomes president, he’s going to be really tired of politics,” Vance told the Financial Times.
“He’s a fundamentally conservative guy, and I think he needs to come off the sidelines and support his candidate,” Vance added.
A representative for Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.
Thiel said last year that he was “not planning on donating money to Republican politicians in 2024” because of his disappointment with Trump’s presidency, but added that “I could always change my mind.”
Trump picked Vance, who rose to fame as the author of a memoir about his impoverished Appalachian childhood, as his running mate in July in an effort to drum up support from blue-collar voters in battleground states.
The Trump campaign has attracted donations from the wealthy elite, including banking heir Tim Mellon, who has donated $115 million to the Trump Group, and private equity boss Steve Schwarzman.
Vance, 40, served in the Marines, graduated from Yale Law School and worked at Thiel’s California venture capital firm before being elected to the U.S. Senate in Ohio.
Speaking at the Republican National Convention last month after Trump named him his running mate, Vance blamed “Wall Street magnates” for the financial crisis and said his party was “done with pandering to Wall Street.”
But Vance told the Financial Times: “I’m not anti-Wall Street, I’m not pro-Wall Street. I’m just pro-real economy, pro-making things and building things in America.”
Regarding regulation of Silicon Valley, he said it should distinguish between big and small tech companies and break up “many” of the larger companies to foster innovation.
“I think Google should be broken up,” Vance said. “I think Google is too big, too powerful, and we’ll see what happens in 2025.”
Asked whether US allies such as the UK, EU and Japan should be forced to pay new tariffs of 10 to 20 percent on imports as proposed by Trump, Vance said China should be treated “a little bit differently”.
Referring to China’s use of forced labor, he added that the United States “must be willing to counter some of the worst excesses of globalization.”
“We need to use carrots and sticks to say, ‘No, we’re not going to allow them access to our markets while they’re trying to undercut American wages and steal American factories.'”
Vance also said the Trump administration would be “concerned” about the United States’ growing debt burden.
A University of Pennsylvania/Wharton budget model projects that Trump’s tax and spending proposals would increase the deficit by $5.8 trillion over the next decade on a traditional basis, compared with $1.2 trillion for Harris’s proposal.
“We take the deficit very seriously, but we’re not going to be held captive to estimates that have been wrong in the past and will likely be wrong in the future,” Vance said.
