Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP Images
Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance speaks during the third night of the Republican National Convention at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, July 17, 2024.
“We’re done catering to Wall Street,” Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance vowed in his acceptance speech to the Republican convention last night. “We’ll commit to the working man!”
Well, there is now another center of American capital, this one roughly 3,000 miles from Wall Street, and J.D. Vance has not yet declared either his or his party’s independence from that one. It’s Silicon Valley—more precisely, its right-wing, we-are-the-law libertarians—and if Donald Trump is elected this November, J.D. Vance will be their man in the White House.
Touching as Vance’s repeated pledges to have the backs of the autoworkers and steelworkers of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin may have been, he doesn’t owe them his new pre-eminence. The people he owes are the billionaires of Silicon Valley, whose wealth far eclipses the mere millionaires of Wall Street.
Wall Street—old capital—was assiduously lobbying Trump not to pick Vance, who has opposed much of the global capital regime they had created. But the day before Trump finally made his choice, he got a call from someone he’d not heard from in a long time: Elon Musk, who weighed in emphatically on Vance’s behalf. The next day, immediately following Trump’s announcement that Vance was his pick, Musk told The Wall Street Journal that he’d be donating $45 million a month to a pro-Trump PAC.
We don’t know, of course, what was asked and answered on that call between Musk and Trump the day before Trump’s Vance announcement. We do know, however, that Trump routinely asks for vast sums of money when he meets with the truly wealthy, famously promising to end all regulations on oil companies if they could just funnel him a billion dollars. They couldn’t, but Elon Musk certainly could. Doubtless other factors entered into Trump’s decision, but if a pledge from Musk and his fellow Silicon Valley gazillionaires wasn’t the closer on the deal, I’d be very surprised.
As he related his life story to the nation last night, Vance passed over in a single sentence his five years as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, much of it spent working for arch-libertarian Peter Thiel. Without the backing he’d received from that rarified world, however, Vance wouldn’t even be in politics today. When he ran for the Senate in Ohio two years ago, his campaign was largely funded by Thiel, who sent him a cool $15 million. One month ago, the Valley delivered for him again, when Vance put together a fundraiser for Trump at the San Francisco home of David Sacks. At the event, according to a Wall Street Journal account, Vance wowed the tech barons by “speaking without a script” about the problems that came with regulating cryptocurrency and AI. He wowed Trump, apparently, by his ability to impress those barons, who forked over $12 million before the event was done.
For Trump, that $12 million was only the hors d’oeuvres. Neither Musk nor Thiel nor many other Valley right-wingers had yet weighed in. But once Trump picked Vance, the big money began to flow, as the phone call with Musk had at least foreshadowed and perhaps even guaranteed. Within hours of Vance’s nomination, the Valley’s most storied venture capitalists, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, announced on their podcast that they were coming in for Trump, as well. They said that when they’d recently visited Washington to win support for their investments in cryptocurrency, they’d not succeeded in getting appointments with either President Biden or SEC Chair Gary Gensler, despite the fact, as Horowitz noted, that the SEC has plans to bring actions against 30 crypto companies in which Andreessen Horowitz has invested. What is America coming to when billionaires can’t get personal meetings with the president and regulators to talk over the best way to protect the value of their investments?
These are the kinds of issues that aren’t quite so central to Wall Street’s old-money elites that Vance clearly relished attacking in his acceptance speech. Unlike JPMorgan Chase and Carl Icahn, venture capitalists like Andreessen and Horowitz made their fortunes investing in the Wild West of Silicon Valley startups, companies that are now plunging into developing new wrinkles in AI and crypto. That alone would sour Andreessen Horowitz on regulations, but to Musk and Thiel and a growing number of the Valley’s biggest players, any infringement on capitalists’ sovereignty is anathema. That’s why Thiel has questioned the merits of having lawmaking nation-states, and why Musk has said he’s opposed to the very idea of unions.
Vance is a graduate of Yale Law, but his real graduate school was working for Thiel and imbibing the Valley’s libertarian ideological brew. This champion of the working stiff may have joined a UAW picket line when it was striking against the three legacy auto companies, but if and when the UAW throws picket lines around Elon Musk’s Tesla factories, it’s hard to believe he’ll walk the line against the guy who got him his gig. For of all the reasons Donald Trump chose J.D. Vance to be his running mate, the one that stands out the clearest is this: Vance came complete with the biggest dowry in human history.
I ALSO SUSPECT ONE ADDITIONAL REASON why Trump went with Vance is that he prefers Silicon Valley to Wall Street as the source of his funding. It was New York banks to which Trump was compelled to go for years for the loans with which he built his buildings, and he’s painfully aware—indeed, this is one source of both his ambition and his deep boiling rage—that the New York business world, having had a decades-long up-close view of him, considers him a doofus, a jerk, and worst of all, a terrible businessman. Far better to get his money from people who didn’t meet him until after he became president.
Finally, one further thought prompted by Vance’s ad nauseam invocations of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin in his speech. If he’s right that, Ohio aside, those are the swing states that will decide the election—and I think he is—then the strongest candidates the Democrats can run against Trump are probably Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, both very popular in their respective states. Just sayin’.
