JD Vance urges billionaire Peter Thiel to help fund Trump’s campaign
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Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee JD Vance has urged tech billionaire Peter Thiel to “get out of the race” and help fund the Republican White House effort, as the party tries to raise funds to defeat Kamala Harris.
Vance’s appeal to Thiel, his former boss in Silicon Valley, came in an interview with the Financial Times in Wisconsin, one of the swing states that could decide the November presidential election.
Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has yet to endorse any candidate in this year’s election despite donating to the Republican Party’s 2016 campaign and funding Vance’s 2022 U.S. Senate bid.
“I’m going to continue to talk to Peter and convince him that — you know, obviously he’s a little burned out on politics — but he’s going to be really burned out on politics if we lose and if Kamala Harris becomes president,” Vance told the FT.
“He’s fundamentally a conservative and I think he needs to step aside and support this ticket,” Vance added.
Thiel’s representative did not respond to a request for comment.
Last year Thiel said He said he had no intention of giving “any money to Republican politicians in 2024” after being disappointed with Trump’s presidency, adding: “There’s always a chance I’ll change my mind.”
Trump picked Vance as his running mate in July, in an effort to appeal to working-class voters in battleground states. Vance is best known as the author of a memoir about his poverty-stricken childhood in Appalachia.
Trump’s campaign has attracted contributions from wealthy elites, including banking heir Tim Mellon, who gave $115 million to a Trump group, and private equity bosses like Steve Schwarzman.
Vance, 40, served in the U.S. Marine Corps, graduated from Yale Law School and worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before being elected a U.S. senator from Ohio.
After Trump named him as his running mate, Vance delivered a speech at the Republican convention last month blaming “Wall Street tycoons” for the financial crisis and saying his party had “no longer served Wall Street.”
But Vance told the FT: “I’m not anti-Wall Street, I’m not pro-Wall Street. I’m just pro-real economics and actually building things and making things in America.”
On Silicon Valley regulation, he distinguished between large and small tech companies, and said “many” large companies should be broken up to promote innovation.
“I think Google should be broken up,” Vance said. “I think it’s too big, too powerful, and we’ll see what that looks like in 2025.”
Asked whether US allies such as the UK, EU or Japan should be forced to pay new import tariffs of 10 to 20 percent as proposed by Trump, Vance said China should be treated “a little differently”.
The United States needs to be “ready to push back against some of the worst excesses of globalization,” he added, referring to China’s use of forced labor.
“You have to use both carrots and sticks to say, ‘No, we’re not going to allow these guys access to our markets when they’re trying to lower American wages and steal American factories.’”
Vance also said the Trump administration would be “concerned” about the growing US debt burden.
The Penn-Wharton budget model predicted that the Trump campaign’s tax and spending proposals would increase the deficit. $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years on a typical basis, compared to $1.2 trillion for Harris.
“We will take the deficit issue very seriously, but we will also not be deterred by estimates that have been wrong in the past and that we think will be wrong in the future,” Vance said.
