West Palm Beach, FL – November 6: Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles listen as Republican presidential … [+]
Although to varying degrees, most of the major players in Silicon Valley have supported President-elect Trump. Big tech benefits from big data, big markets and big government support. The sector’s playbook is fundamentally global – even “globalist”. Sometimes, it even intersects with Trumpism’s nation non grata: China.
Trump’s orbit increasingly includes Silicon Valley elites, who have managed to overlook the populist rhetoric that doesn’t appeal to them and aggressively embrace the anti-surveillance stance that is so clear. But they aren’t the only backers with ties to big tech firms who look set to take on the MAGA field.
Susie Wiles, who will serve as Trump’s chief of staff, served as Mercury’s co-chair of public affairs until she began working on his 2024 campaign. Mercury is a lobbying firm with clients in industries such as big tobacco, food junk and Chinese tech firms.
Chinese video surveillance company Hikvision has paid Wiles’ former employer $5.5 million since 2015, according to Justice Department filings. Hikvision is known for supplying surveillance technology to authorities in Xinjiang province, who have used it to target the ethnic Uyghur minority. Last year, Amnesty International revealed that the company’s surveillance equipment was also being used in the West Bank.
For these and other reasons, Hikvision has been blacklisted in the United States. The Commerce Department banned US firms from doing business with Hikvision during Trump’s first term. But Mercury appears to have circumvented this limitation by contracting with the company’s US division.
Wiles is not the only person in Trump’s orbit to have worked at Mercury, despite the firm’s clash with Trump’s policy agenda. In 2018, the Trump administration banned Chinese telecom firm ZTE from buying American equipment. ZTE then hired Mercury to fight the ban; Bryan Lanza, a former Trump campaign staffer, contacted White House officials to lobby on behalf of the Chinese firm. However, such conflicts are not what Trump is referring to when he talks about the “enemy from within.”
In the long run, it may be hard to hide the glaring incongruity between MAGA’s isolationist message and the “globalist” business relationships that Trump’s top staff embody.
This group includes Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, X and other technology ventures. He’s earned his MAGA credentials by talking about the liberal “threat” to free speech and publicly disowning his daughter because she’s trans.
But Musk isn’t the only ultra-rich far-right tech personality throwing his weight behind Trump. Peter Thiel, the conservative founder of the defense technology company Palantir, has supported Trump from the start. His anti-regulatory motives are obvious. For their part, Silicon Valley venture capitalists Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz each donated $2.5 million to Trump.
“Some of these guys see Trump as their ‘get out of jail free’ card,” Jacob Silverman, author of the forthcoming book. The Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valleyhe said on the eve of the elections. They imagine a second Trump term will mean they are free from Justice Department investigations into their companies, antitrust lawsuits from FTC Chairman Lina Khan and even criminal exposure in areas such as securities fraud. Trump, Silverman said, is seen as willing to pardon these people and “make their problems go away.”
Billionaires have portfolios the size of GDP, yet want more. They feel that their innovative potential has been limited by the Democrats. They hope that Trump’s governing style of indecent absence will lengthen their chains.
Some Trump voters may eventually become disenchanted with his pandering to plutocrats. Even if they are, it likely won’t matter electorally in 2028.