Billionaire and immortality enthusiast Peter Thiel, who placed a quixotic bet on Donald Trump in 2016, is standing down this election cycle, promising he won’t donate to Trump, or anyone else running for office, in 2024. Thiel’s abstention has been rumored since April, but in a move reminiscent of an addict who needs a sponsor to talk him off the ledge, Thiel asked Atlantic staff writer Barton Gellman to record his promise to stay out of politics in 2024 so he wouldn’t be tempted to renege.
And why is Thiel opting out? In part, it’s because he thinks Trump went too far and was a lot “crazier” and “more dangerous” than he expected.
Hmm, go figure.
Of course, Thiel’s initial Trump bet wasn’t exactly clear-eyed. As Gellman tells it, it stemmed, in part, from a truly cynical—and nihilistic—decision that only a libertarian with more money than sense could appreciate.
For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.
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But the days when great men could achieve great things in government are gone, Thiel believes. He disdains what the federal apparatus has become: rule-bound, stifling of innovation, a “senile, central-left regime.” His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it.
“‘Make America great again’ was the most pessimistic slogan of any candidate in 100 years, because you were saying that we are no longer a great country,” Thiel told me. “And that was a shocking slogan for a major presidential candidate.”
“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told Gellman. According to Gellman, Thiel had “fantasized that Trump’s election would somehow force a national reckoning” and that “somebody needed to tear things down—slash regulations, crush the administrative state—before the country could rebuild.”
Unfortunately, once the leopard was through licking the foie gras off Thiel’s face, it suddenly acquired a taste for human faces in general, and Thiel began to see the potential downsides of a Thousand-Year Trumpian Reich.
“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” Thiel said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was—I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”
Trump, it turns out, was too unhinged even for Thiel, whose gaudy cash reserves have led him down some truly weird paths that Gellman doesn’t hesitate to catalog—did you know he was an FBI informant?
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Of course, a billionaire Trump supporter opting out of the 2024 election cycle entirely is unambiguously a good thing. Thiel famously, if quietly, pulled all monetary support for Trump in 2020, but in 2022, Thiel was propping up the Senate campaigns of election deniers J.D. Vance and Blake Masters with $10 million cash infusions—each. And so this complete withdrawal is especially telling, given that Thiel isn't exactly a mainstream, grounded—or even totally sane—thinker. He doesn’t represent Main Street or Wall Street so much as Bonkers Boulevard.
Consider his 2009 manifesto “The Education of a Libertarian,” in which he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He also argued that “[s]ince 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the [voting] franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
He also fantasizes about living forever, like the elves in “The Lord of the Rings.” Just so you know who we’re dealing with.
During his conversation with Gellman, Thiel wondered aloud about the famous trilogy’s take on immortality.
“There are all these ways where trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire,” he said. “And then there are sort of all these questions, you know: How are the elves different from the humans in Tolkien? And they’re basically—I think the main difference is just, they’re humans that don’t die.”
“So why can’t we be elves?” Gellman asked.
Thiel nodded at that, “his expression a blend of hope and chagrin,” wrote Gellman.
“Why can’t we be elves?” Thiel repeated.
In other words, the same guy who’s openly skeptical of democracy, suggests that women’s suffrage is incompatible with 21st century capitalism, and wants to be an immortal Lord of the Rings elf? Even that guy thinks Donald Trump is too out there. And he's no fan of the GOP writ large.
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What should that tell you about the current state of the Republican Party? After all, you can only cut so much meat off the bones of government before you’re forced to start sucking the marrow out of its femurs like a coked-up hyena. And, sadly, the marrow-sucking is proceeding apace. All around us.
Consider how, after Ohio overwhelmingly voted to enshrine abortion rights via referendum, state Republicans decided they’d prefer to pretend none of that ever happened. Voters also clapped back at book banners during Tuesday's elections, demonstrating that conservatives have long since breached the event horizon on that issue as well. And many Republicans who should know better are doubling down on election denialism, despite mounting evidence that it’s a huge electoral loser.
Denver Post columnist Krista Kafer recently remarked on the Colorado GOP’s embrace of unhingery after the party hyped an interview with self-described white nationalist Laura Loomer and invited Kari Lake, Arizona’s notorious election denier and un-governor, to speak at its annual fundraising dinner.
Loomer has proved too insane for the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman who believes Jewish bankers light wildfires with space lasers. MTG warned former President Trump’s reelection campaign against hiring Loomer, which they were considering, because the congresswoman believes the white nationalist is too deranged and too dishonest for the job. That’s saying something.
A couple days after tweeting about the Loomer-Williams interview, the Colorado Republican Party welcomed Kari Lake, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate, as the party’s annual fundraising dinner speaker. Lake, an election conspiracy theorist, has yet to concede her loss to Katie Hobbs in 2022 blaming election fraud sans evidence. She attempted to overturn the election results in court but thus far has lost every case. Lake is being sued for defamation by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Rich for falsehoods she spread about him after the 2020 presidential election that made him a target of death threats.
In other words, bonkers is kind of the GOP’s brand now—and even weirdo libertarians who want to be elves are saying, “Whoa! Too rich for my blood.”
Even before Thiel’s promise, Republicans were already facing a fundraising problem. And with GOP donors still scrambling to find an alternative to Trump—while Trump simultaneously sucks all the money, oxygen, and sense out of small-dollar GOP donors—it’s starting to look like Republicans are facing an insurmountable sanity gap that puts them squarely behind the 8-ball going into 2024.
We’ll see if anything changes, but if we’re lucky, Republicans will keep failing to learn the lessons of their electoral pratfalls until it’s far too late. So please proceed, Republicans. You have nothing to lose but Congress, any reasonable shot at regaining the White House, and all your influence. And if that happens, maybe we can start taxing people like Peter Thiel the way they really should be taxed.