Jasmine Sun, fit to rule, @jasmine, June 6, 2025:
As of yesterday, Elon has left the Trump White House to pursue the full-time venture of Twitter canceling his former boss. For many, the fallout of the “tech right” is no surprise. Silicon Valley and MAGA conservatism were always an odd fit—tied more by who they hated than what they support.
I’m still fascinated and befuddled by what drove so many founders and investors to support Trump in 2024. Most of these folks are not deep Republican partisans or racist caricatures; many are even intelligent, well-intentioned, and politically engaged—yet voted in a way I consider deeply and destructively wrong.
I trawled my group chats for someone willing to have a candid conversation. This person is a founder, immigrant, and Bernie-to-Trump supporter. Below, we discuss “country club Democrats,” why founders see themselves in Trump, and why he turned on the current administration. I’m grateful that he spent time talking to me, and hope you’ll give it a read. (As with the last anonymous interview, this person is an individual, not a spokesperson.)
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From about a third of the way in:
What do you mean by “fit to empire”?
Establishment Democrats never had to earn their position, they were just maintaining a certain status. They never understood what it takes to get there.
There's a general discomfort in the language of establishment Democratic politics in saying the things that have to be said. A great example of that is Trump 1.0's negotiations with Iran. Being a strongman actually works in a way that “Best regards, Joe Biden” energy doesn't.
There's something middle-manager-y about it.
Yes. "We ought to analyze… Let's pinpoint that." Middle management language prevents you from thinking the things you need to think to rule effectively. And it's important. If the US doesn't do things, wars can start. You have a responsibility to do what's right.
I just felt like these people were messing with the lives of billions of people and millions of Americans for some country club status, as in, "I said the right things. It didn't work, but I said the right thing." Moral purity, even though it's deeply morally impure. There's no logic behind it. It's all agreements within these small groups, and they get to run the country because MSNBC told them to. None of this shit makes sense. I believe the internet is the Cassandra, the bearer of the future. And it frustrates me when you have stagnant institutions running the show.
Was your feeling of isolation just about October 7, or politics in general?
Politics in general. You have to remember it was also peak wokeness. I'm a fan of woke, but it became very Stalinist at some point. Trump said shit that was obviously true, that you were not supposed to say out loud. Like I don't actually care about the border being open; economic immigration doesn't bother me at all. But it should have been communicated that there's a lot of immigration happening.
Then there was the exhilaration of seeing tech people support him—people I respect. I respect Peter Thiel deeply. I think he's one of the smartest people alive. I don't respect Elon Musk, but he's very efficacious. After everyone started to turn for Trump, I saw the TikTok where he stood up and said, "Fight." It was a moment of exhilaration. You had this fragile, clearly misplaced candidate in the shape of Joe Biden, and then you had this guy saying, "Fight," and I was like, "Oh my God, we have hope. We can actually take our country back."
That's how it felt—a release from this Ring of Fire Stalinist club that you're not invited to and you can never be part of. It doesn't matter how rich you become, you need to say the right things. It ended up being the Democrats’ downfall, because they picked a candidate that said the right things but was deeply incompetent. [...]
Of your tech friends—and I understand this is a self-selecting group—what was the fraction of people who supported Trump?
By election day? 100%. Almost everyone.
There was a group of tech people who are Trump supporters, except they’d never admit it. They're trying to preserve their elite country club status. They'll share Trump memes and adopt right-wing Twitter lingo. They talk about the policies that they like, and they're all Trump policies. But they won't say, "I'm a Republican." So it's a MAGA-coded elite, an "if you know, you know" thing.
You can see that with the American Dynamists. They all say they'd vote for Kamala. I went to this American Dynamist party, and they were shouting U-S-A! U-S-A! These are small skinny guys like me. They're all twinks, but pretend that they're pro-military, tall, jawlined, blonde, fascist guys. There's a lot of LARP and status-seeking. At some point, the tables turned and it was cool to be right-wing in Silicon Valley.
Where are these conversations happening?
Group chats, parties, DMs.
And these are mostly founders and investors, as opposed to tech employees?
Yeah, mostly founders and investors. Powerful people.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like there was some identification with Trump.
Huge identification, of course. The guy was a contrarian. Think about how much he was clowned in 2015. People said it would be the worst presidency in history. I don't know if it was a good presidency, but it was certainly a great presidency. Warp Speed was an insane operation. Normalizing deals in the Middle East, that’s hard. Not going to war. People said he couldn't come back as a felon. Yet he still had the will to win—this shit is inspiring for Fountainhead types.
One thing that I'm hearing myself say is that not at any point am I thinking about policy. It's all aesthetics. I think Democratic stuff is bullshit because the aesthetics are wrong. There are some policies that I don't like, but ultimately, it felt like the wrong way to do things.
I was going to ask about that. It's like if you're a VC, you're investing in a person, not an idea. Their ideas might change. They say they're going to build X, but who knows what they're going to build? If the person has the right attitude, if they have the grit, if they have the whatever-it-is inside of them, that's what you're voting for. That's what you're investing in.
Yeah, that is exactly correct. [...]
Then Trump wins. You celebrate.
One of my friends threw a liberal watch party, and I didn't attend because I knew that I'd be crying with happiness at getting our fucking culture back. I was extremely excited. I was on the group chats. I called my father and I’m like, "Finally. The US is a declining empire no more.”
Then it starts to go south. Before Trump takes power, actually, when the DOGE thing happens. In his acceptance speech, he's like, "Elon, a star is born.” And, okay, Elon is here. Then the DOGE meme starts, and that's a little weird. I like jokes, but ruling is serious business. Then tech people I know start to work at DOGE, and they're the least talented, most sycophantic, most status-oriented founders and builders that I knew. Big claims are starting to be made. Trump wanted to do things that I didn't agree with.
Which claims or actions did you disagree with?
DOGE claimed "We're going to end the deficit." And if you look at the charts, most of it is Social Security. I think Social Security is good. Again, human dignity. So that started to get disconnected from reality. You're on a high of winning, then you look at the facts, and they don't quite match.
Trump’s rhetoric against colleges starts to get more aggressive. I visited Columbia when the protests were going on. I think the Columbia campus is antisemitic. But scientific research is important. I was really excited about the "burn it to the ground" stuff, then you start to realize what "burn it to the ground" means. It starts to freak me out.
When Trump takes office, all hell breaks loose. You get the ICE stuff. I see videos of immigrants being put in handcuffs and deported on a plane chartered by the US government. That's the point where reason came to my senses.
Yeah, sure, I believe in massive government reform. But also, it's hard to cut Medicaid. And I hate unions, but a shitty engineer on DOGE publishing code on GitHub that has a filter by union is extremely stupid.
Skipping over a lot of stuff to the very end:
What do you want to see from politics going forward?
I'll go back to Bernie. Bernie was the first politician that touched me, not just because I think the economic policy was interesting, but because he had authenticity. You kind of get that with Trump's strong-man energy, but you also lose it, because he's such a cultist.
I think it's important to understand that things can be changed. I want to see less of the belief that what we have now—the normalcy—is good. It’s not. The US is a powerful country. It can choose to exert that power in ways that are good, or in ways that are bad. But doing nothing is perhaps the biggest of all injustices.
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There's more at the link.
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