JD Vance urges billionaire Peter Thiel to help bankroll Trump campaign

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Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance has urged tech billionaire Peter Thiel to “get off the sidelines” and help bankroll the Republicans’ White House bid, as the party tries to build a war chest to defeat Kamala Harris.

Vance’s plea to Thiel, his former Silicon Valley boss, came in an interview with the Financial Times in Wisconsin, one of the swing states that could decide November’s presidential election.

Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has been reluctant to support any candidates in this year’s election despite donating to the Republican campaign in 2016 and sponsoring Vance’s US senate bid in 2022.

“I’m going to keep on talking to Peter and persuading him that — you know he’s obviously been exhausted by politics a little bit — but he’s going to be really exhausted by politics if we lose and if Kamala Harris is president,” Vance told the FT.

“He is fundamentally a conservative guy, and I think that he needs to get off the sidelines and support the ticket,” Vance added.

A Thiel representative did not respond to requests for comment.

Last year Thiel said he did not intend to give “any money to Republican politicians in 2024” after being disappointed by the Trump presidency, adding: “There’s always a chance I might change my mind.”

Trump picked Vance as his running mate in July, in a bid to court blue-collar voters in the battleground states. Vance came to fame as the author of a memoir of his early life in poverty in Appalachia.

The Trump campaign has attracted donations from a wealthy elite, including banking heir Tim Mellon, who has given $115mn to a Trump group, and private equity bosses such as Steve Schwarzman.

Vance, 40, served in the US Marines, graduated from Yale Law School, and worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before being elected as a US senator for Ohio.

After Trump named him as his running mate, Vance delivered a speech at Republican convention last month blaming “Wall Street barons” for the financial crisis and said his party was “done . . . catering to Wall Street”.

But Vance told the FT: “I’m not anti Wall Street, I’m not pro Wall Street. I’m just pro the real economy and actually building things and making things in America.”

On Silicon Valley regulation he differentiated between big and small tech companies, and said “a lot” of the big ones should be split to promote innovation.

“I think Google ought to be broken up,” said Vance. “I think it’s way too big, way too powerful, and we’ll see how things look in 2025.”

Asked if American allies such as the UK, EU or Japan should be forced to pay Trump’s proposed new tariff of 10 to 20 per cent on imports, Vance said China should be treated “a little bit different”.

The US needed to be “willing to push back against some of the worst excesses of globalisation”, he added, referring to China’s use of forced labour.

“You need to use the carrot and the stick to say, ‘No, we’re not going to allow these guys to have access to our markets when they’re trying to undercut American wages and steal American factories’.”

Vance also said a Trump administration would “care” about the US’s growing debt burden.

The Penn-Wharton budget model has projected that the Trump campaign’s tax and spending proposals would increase deficits by $5.8tn over the next 10 years on a conventional basis, compared to $1.2tn for Harris. 

“We’re going to take the deficit very seriously, but we’re also not going to be hamstrung by estimates that have been wrong in the past, and we think are going to be wrong in the future,” said Vance.