Peter and the Wolf


One of my favorite films of all time is All the President’s Men, the story of how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the truth behind the Watergate burglars who broke into Democratic National Headquarters in 1972. One of the oft-quoted lines in the film is “Follow the money,” spoken by Deep Throat, Woodward’s source who turned out to be second in command at the FBI. In reality, Deep Throat never actually said this to Woodward. Nonetheless it has stuck.

In the cause of following the money, I wanted to learn about a man called Peter Thiel, who bank-rolled J.D. Vance’s journey to the US Senate. Vance had no political experience. He was someone who’d written a memoir (full disclosure: I have not read it). So I wondered what it was that Peter Thiel saw in J.D. Vance that prompted him to give $15 million to the PAC Promote Ohio Values, which ran a multitude of ads supporting Vance.

Peter Thiel is the founder of PayPal. He’s also the founder of Palantir, a CIA-backed big data start-up that collects and analyzes large amounts of data about people. (As an example: Palantir received over $127 million for its work for an ICE surveillance contract.) He was the general partner of a venture capital firm called Founders Fund, weighing in on their large investments, such as SpaceX. He was also one of the first big investors in Facebook. He is the key financier of the Make America Great Again movement, and he backed 16 Senate and House candidates (aside from J.D. Vance) with $20.4 million. Since 2020, he has spent more than $49 million on political campaigns.

Thiel’s relationship to J.D. Vance is simple enough. He was J.D. Vance’s boss at his Silicon Valley venture capital firm. In 2021, Thiel and Vance invested together in Rumble, a conservative alternative to YouTube that, by 2022 became one of the leading social media news platforms on the right. This investment went through Mr. Vance’s Cincinnati-based private equity fund. While Thiel gave Donald Trump $1.25 million after the “grab ‘em by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape, he indicated he would not be financing Trump’s 2024 run for the Presidency. Nonetheless, in 2016, shortly after Trump’s victory, Thiel was given his own office at Trump Tower where he recommended candidates for jobs in the new administration (one of whom was named to Senior Staff of the National Security Council).

Money given to Trump, however, isn’t what we might want to examine. Rather, as voters we might want to consider what money to J.D. Vance might presage.

I’m not sure there are any billionaires who give money to political candidates without expecting a little something in return. In the case of Peter Thiel, there are indications within his interviews and his speeches that indicate a couple of troubling political leanings on his part. Two of his remarks should give us special concern: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and “Women gaining voting rights rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into oxymoron.” (By simplest definition an oxymoron is a contradiction of terms.) The first suggests a country freed of all regulations that might be put upon anyone and anything (such as corporations) by the government. The second suggests a breathtaking degree of misogyny.

You might say “So what? Peter Thiel isn’t running for President,” and this is true. But it seems to me that an outlay of money on the part of a billionaire to bolster the campaign of an individual is an act looking for a quid pro quo, or in simplistic terms: “I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”

This idea of mutual back-scratching brings me to J.D. Vance and what I think of as The Big Picture. I believe we need to look at what that picture very well might be. Donald Trump—should he be elected President—owes Peter Thiel nothing. J.D. Vance—on the other hand—will owe Thiel a lot. It would be foolish to assume that Donald Trump pulled the name J.D. Vance out of the air to choose him as his running mate. With apologies to Mr. Trump’s supporters, he doesn’t seem astute enough to have done that. What is more likely is that he was urged to choose J. D. Vance, and what is far more likely, in my opinion, is that J. D. Vance is being positioned for the Presidency.

Nonsense! some individuals would claim. Trump is our man, our messiah, our leader! Trump has been sent by God to right the wrongs that “wokeness” has inflicted upon the suffering American people! But the truth is that the “suffering American people” have chosen as their savior a 78-year-old man who is clearly in mental decline, and no degree in neurology is required to see that there is something happening to Mr. Trump’s brain. His father died from Alzheimer’s, a disease that is at least partly hereditary in that in runs in families. If Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia has developed in Mr. Trump’s brain, he will either die during his Presidency or he will simply be unable to fulfill his duties. Those duties will devolve to Mr. Vance.

Thus, a vote for Mr. Trump becomes a vote for Mr. Vance. It becomes a vote for Project 2025 and the draconian proposals therein that Mr. Vance has supported. It becomes vote to give at least one arch-conservative billionaire the ear of the President. It becomes a vote to alter the lives of immigrants, young people, old people, women, and the poor.

The MAGA movement, as led by Donald Trump and supported by the GOP, long ago adopted the slogan “Make America Great Again. Voters need to ask themselves how, in the four years he spent in the Oval Office, Donald Trump managed that promise. Perhaps it’s time for all of us who support everything from democracy to common sense to adopt the slogan “Take America Back Again.” Not back in time, but back in possession. If we do not manage to do that in the coming election, the consequences to everyone save white billionaires will be grave indeed.

Elizabeth George
Seattle, Washington
October 25, 2024