Tech Magnates Put Second Trump Coalition to its First Test

Originally this was going to be a post election report on my favorite guy, but quickly became much more as the H-1B visa debate began to pick up steam.

David Sacks has been named by Donald Trump as the incoming ‘A.I. and Crypto Czar’. Besides the irony of the title given Sacks’ obsession with Ukraine, this is not actually massive news in terms of policy. It was clear when Sacks’ hosted Trump for a lavish fundraiser in June that preceded a picking Thiel associate J.D. Vance as his running mate in July that this administration was always going to be solidly pro AI and crypto. This isn’t to say that Biden was ever particularly hostile to either, but I suspect that Trump will go out of his way to bail these industries out in case of a shake up in the coming years.

If I credit David Sacks with anything here, it would be his help in opening the floodgates to others like him joining the administration. Most notable is Elon Musk, although Marc Andreessen has been making waves recently for his deepening involvement after Trump’s victory. Where Peter Thiel failed to make much headway with Trump after his 2016 victory, his coworkers have been given essentially free rein to run their own industries. One might wonder how Thiel is feeling right now, seeing his acolytes and underlings succeed where he could have only hoped to, all without any of his help or wisdom.

While Thiel focused on patronage of fringe intellectuals and giving a new meaning to the term ‘twink death’, Sacks was the one in the trenches, putting together this new coalition. Thiel managed to conjure up an Oz-like image of himself as a master manipulator in 2016 through selective leaks and rare, but memorable public appearances. Sacks, in a Nixonian fashion, bided his time to build a more robust coalition based on business interests and social resentment. I hope that we can collectively move past Thiel as the catch-all figure, at least for now. His ideas didn't work, and getting people to think he was Dracula was really the only successful way he shaped the media narrative.