Some of my thoughts, filtered slightly for public consumption.

Boldness Alone is no Virtue

For a while, I have been confused by the positive feelings in Silicon Valley towards the second Trump administration. Certain high-profile figures have obviously benefited from personal relationships with Trump and his cronies, and a few high-profile exits have been made possible by relaxed antitrust regulation, but the support is much broader than that—even formerly liberal "tech bros" are, if not outright supporters, at least positively inclined towards Trump. Why?

I think the attitude I'm seeing comes down to this:

America has a lot of serious problems which can't be fixed without bold action. The Democrats are too cowardly to do it. This administration is taking bold action, so even if they don't succeed, at least they are trying.

This resonates in Silicon Valley because, in startups, boldness really is the most important thing. To become fantastically wealthy from a startup requires being very bold, making the right bet, and getting lucky. But being right and being bold are not equally important—you can still get very wealthy by betting on the same thing as everyone else[0], so long as you are bold enough. And crucially, you can't lose very much from doing this. You're spending investors' money, these investors have hundreds of diversified bets, and they don't flinch at total write-downs. Besides, if you are not bold enough you'll eventually run out of money anyway[1]. All of this creates a huge asymmetric incentive to be as bold as possible.

But this doesn't translate to running the country, for two reasons:

  1. You have to target the actual problems
  2. There is a lot to lose

Not Even Trying

Expanding on the attitude I mentioned earlier, if you ask for a list of America's problems you will usually get some subset of the following:

I will grant that most of these are serious problems. I will also grant that this administration is taking a lot of bold actions:

So why are they not taking bold action on these problems? Out of 17, the Trump administration is only taking action on two[4]: woke culture (by targeting universities) and illegal immigration (via ICE goon squads). The other 15 are forgotten, and 10 out of 12 of these bold actions aren't even trying to solve a serious American[5] problem.

It would be one thing if DOGE had stopped disability payments to 10,000,000 Americans they don't think should be eligible, or if Trump were deploying the National Guard to police crime-ridden neighborhoods. But they didn't even try!

"At Least They ..."

Now, some people in Silicon Valley think that woke culture is/was far and away America's number one problem, and the Trump administration is worthwhile just for attacking it. This view resonates in the valley for several reasons. First, it has always been a very male and white/asian place, putting it in the woke cross-hairs from the start. Second, it is highly attuned to, and its self-conception is partially defined by contrasts with, academia and the media, both of which were epicenters of woke culture. Third, by mostly eschewing the woke hiring practices that largely excluded half of a generation of "non-diverse" young professionals from these institutions, Silicon Valley absorbed a large share of them, bringing understandable anger with them.

But this confuses cause and effect. With apologies to Richard Hanania, woke culture is upstream of politics, not created or heavily influenced by government policy. The backlash to wokeness is (one of) the main reasons why Trump won, not a consequence of his winning. There are certain mechanisms by which the government can encourage or discourage it, but I doubt these outweigh the thermostatic cultural backlash we also see against the party in power. After all, wokeness peaked during the previous Trump administration, and happened almost in lockstep around the Anglophone world.

Perhaps being bold is the hardest and most important thing? This is believable in Silicon Valley because, as previously mentioned, it probably is correct for startups—you don't even need a particularly good idea as long as you go with the crowd. It gives rise to a natural anti-anti-Trump argument: Trump's critics aren't mad about bad ideas or bad targeting, they're mad about big, bold action. They would be mad at the hypothetical President that America desperately needs. They are the Enemy of Progress.

Here is where we must consider the differences between running a startup and the most successful country in the history of the world. The asymmetric risks are reversed—there is a lot to lose, and it is easier to destroy than to build. Historically, a bold leader taking charge of an existing state is far more likely to be a Hugo Chavez or an Idi Amin than a Napoleon Bonaparte.

But even granting the hypothesis, it is a facile point that most of your political opponents make stupid arguments. Most arguments on any side of a political issue are stupid. Have you looked at your own side?

And how does this administration play out? Will they finally find both the right targets and the right ideas? Laughably unlikely. If any of their bold bets pay off, it's far more likely they will succeed in ending the international order that has made America so successful, destroying our talent pipeline from the rest of the world, or ending our democracy. More likely, one of these backfires spectacularly or enough smaller failures accumulate that this administration becomes one of the least popular in history and the next election is a race to distinguish oneself from its stinking corpse. Today's Trump critics are not going to undermine the case for bold action. The Trump administration is doing that themselves.

  1. ^

    If you raise a few rounds, you can sell some of your shares in the later rounds (a "secondary sale"), even if you never end up getting acquired, going public, or producing real value. But also, everyone else has a decent chance of being right! There was certainly a lot of money to be made in B2B SaaS when that was the popular thesis.

  2. ^

    And time is precious, so running out of money slowly is worse than running out of money quickly!

  3. ^

    Okay, this one isn't commonly mentioned, but it should be—it is over 5% of the federal budget, rapidly rising, and there is a lot of fraud.

  4. ^

    Of course this is partly caused by past unsustainable spending on other things, but it's a separate category because it's better thought of as being caused by a tax/spending mismatch.

  5. ^

    Well, three if you believe vaccines and modern medicines cause our poor health outcomes, but that is extremely stupid.

  6. ^

    A case can be made that Trump's military actions target other countries' major problems. But neither Iran nor Venezuela were major problems for the US. And we're apparently leaving the same party in place in Venezuela?

Other Posts