Powerful Democrat Donor Switches Teams, Now BACKING President Trump
A former Democratic donor and current big tech executive explained in an interview late last week why he and many others in the industry are now backing former President Donald Trump.
Jacob Helberg, a senior policy advisor to Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp, and a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, shared his reasons for switching support from President Joe Biden and other Democrats to Trump during an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.
"Deep blue turning red as the tide turns. Trump in Silicon Valley, members of California’s starkly liberal technology community turning out to support the massive fundraiser last week in the Trump campaign, raking in $12 million at the event," Bartiromo said, noting that Helberg attended the event.
“You were once a prominent Democrat donor and gave to Biden in his last presidential campaign, but you were there this week supporting President Trump. What happened?” she asked.
“Over the last four years, I, like many in California and Silicon Valley, saw the Democratic Party get hijacked by the Squad and woke theology,” Helberg explained. “President Biden campaigned as a moderate but has governed as a radical progressive. He has spent all of his time catering to his base and is now completely out of step with the rest of the country.”
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Silicon Valley, located near San Francisco—Nancy Pelosi’s district—has long been a Democratic stronghold. Just the News reported that the $12 million fundraising amount did not come from the city’s average citizens but rather from large-dollar donors connected to Silicon Valley.
Located in the Bay Area, the Valley hosts numerous tech and venture capital firms. Recently, many of its leading figures have, for various reasons, expressed their support for the former president.
“In 2016, the number of people from Silicon Valley I knew who supported Trump was a sample of one, which was Peter [Thiel],” Helberg told Reuters after the event. “Today, I count them in the dozens, if not more. Over the past six months, we’ve started to see the dam break.”
A Trump campaign official told Just the News that “[t]he event hosted by David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya had over 100 attendees. Some of the most important investors and innovators from the tech industry were in attendance and they raised $12 million dollars.”
Sacks has been a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, especially regarding the Ukraine War. His analysis and calls for negotiations with Moscow have generated significant online interest.
In a lengthy X post last week, Sacks outlined his reasons for supporting Trump, citing the economy, foreign affairs, border security, and "lawfare" targeting the former president.
“With Biden, our choices are limited to fighting the proxy war to the last Ukrainian, or fighting Russia ourselves,” Sacks wrote. “President Trump has said he wants the dying in Ukraine to stop and will seek to end the war through a negotiated settlement. Ukraine will no longer be able to get the deal we talked them out of in April 2022, but we can still save Ukraine as an independent nation and avert world war.”
Sacks also highlighted several economic metrics and argued “[w]e can’t afford another four years of Bidenomics.” He accused Biden of enabling a “de facto open border policy” and claimed the administration had pursued “elective prosecutions against his political opponents.”