JD Vance begs gay billionaire Peter Thiel to fund his & Donald Trump’s campaign

On a recent campaign stop in Wisconsin, a vital swing state in the 2024 presidential election, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) urged Peter Thiel – the out, billionaire tech investor who bankrolled his winning Senate bid in 2022 – to “get off the sidelines” and support him and former President Trump in their campaign for the White House.

Thiel has so far declined to support Trump in his third run for the White House.

Related:

Peter Thiel is the conservative gay billionaire behind JD Vance’s rise to power

The conservative tech titan has been a patron of the Republican VP nominee since the start of his career.

“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 Financial Times.

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

The gay conservative founder of Palantir, an internet analytics firm, backed Donald Trump in 2016, hoping for government deregulation in tech and other sectors in line with his libertarian ideology.

But claiming disappointment with Trump’s first term, Thiel has so far declined to support the MAGA king for a second, even as he worked behind the scenes to get Vance installed as the twice-impeached former president’s No. 2.

Last year, Thiel said he didn’t intend to give “any money to Republican politicians in 2024.”

“They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work,” Thiel told The Atlantic of the Trump administration. “So that was — I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”

“There’s always a chance I might change my mind,” Thiel added about a possible GOP cash infusion.

Last week, the Harris campaign reported they had raised a combined $540 million with affiliated groups since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, dwarfing the Trump campaign’s take in the same time period.

Thiel, the gay co-founder of PayPal, took a liking to Vance after they met when Vance was an undergraduate at Yale and buttonholed Thiel at a lecture. Thiel has been a kind of angel investor in Vance’s career ever since, recommending him for work as a venture capitalist and hiring him at his own VC firm.

Following the success of Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Thiel bankrolled his run for the Senate with $15 million, setting him on a path to become Trump’s running mate.

In his Yale lecture, Thiel detailed what he called the failures of elite institutions and his belief in Christianity, which led Vance to reconsider a career in law and pushed him into tech. Raised a Protestant evangelical, Vance also followed Thiel’s lead when he converted to Catholicism in 2019. Vance’s wife, Usha, is a practicing Hindu.

While Thiel came out as a Trump supporter in 2016, Vance didn’t follow his patron’s example — yet.

“My god what an idiot,” Vance tweeted about Trump the month before the election.

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