At least Trump is not a ‘zombie’ telling ‘beautiful lies’ – Tech investor Peter Thiel
US President Donald Trump may be a “rude, mean person” but he is a “very healthy corrective” to a culture of political correctness and ideological platitudes, former Silicon Valley magnate Peter Thiel has said.
The co-founder of PayPal defended the current US president at an event in Sao Paulo, Brazil on Monday.
“I got to meet a lot of people running for president on the US Republican side in 2016 and they all felt like zombies,” Thiel said. “They couldn’t say anything different other than programmed ideological soundbites.” Trump was “a very healthy corrective to that,” he added, according to Bloomberg.
“I fully understand why people think of President Trump as a rude, mean person,” the tech entrepreneur said. “But I think that’s often better than telling beautiful lies about the way the country is working.”
Thiel has paid for his outspoken support of Trump in the overwhelmingly liberal climate of Silicon Valley: Y Combinator, a startup accelerator where he was a part-time partner, severed ties with him in November 2017. He recently relocated to Los Angeles.
At Monday’s event, he maintained that Trump has done good things for the US, despite “all the flaws, all the challenges” his administration has had so far.
“I believe it was incredibly important to articulate certain things about how our political institutions and our society were not working as well as before,” Thiel told his audience in Brazil.
The German-born entrepreneur is best known for launching PayPal and becoming the first outside investor in Facebook. He also founded the data analysis company Palantir Technologies and runs venture capital companies Mithril Capital and Valar Ventures.
If you like this story, share it with a friend!
