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Billionaire Republican megadonor Peter Thiel called the 2022 midterms a ‘depressing disaster’ for his party and voiced concerns the GOP could continue losing elections for years to come if they don’t find a uniting principle.
His suggestion: the party should unite as a check against China.
‘And the part of it that’s not merely disastrous, but also depressing, is just the sense that if we don’t do something different, we’re just going to be in this Groundhog Day, where something like this is going to repeat in 2024 or throughout the rest of this decade,’ Thiel said.
The billionaire tech investor is close friends with two Republicans who were on the ballot and helped finance their primary campaigns – J.D. Vance, who won his race in Ohio, and Blake Masters, who lost to the incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona.
‘My felt sense was this was structurally a very good year for Republicans. The economy was a disaster, the inflation out of control, the energy policy terrible – not to say much even about Biden’s dementia,’ he said to laughs from the audience. ‘If you can’t sort of win in that kind of context, how are you ever going to win?’
Thiel delivered remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California Tuesday night – and never once mentioned the pull former President Donald Trump still held over the Republican Party. He never once said Trump’s name.
Billionaire Republican megadonor Peter Thiel called the 2022 midterms a ‘depressing disaster’ for his party and voiced concerns the GOP could continue losing elections for years to come
At the top of his remarks, Thiel pointed out that he wasn’t born in the United States – meaning he can’t be a presidential contender – and so was merely giving the talk as ‘free advice for the Republican Party.’
Thiel said he believed that the party had a ‘substantive agenda problem.’
And that the losses came about because the party was ‘discombobulated’ and the ‘diversity’ of the party was ‘more of a weakness than a strength.’
‘The Star Wars analogy I like to use is the Democrats are like the Imperial Storm Troopers and we’re sort of this rag-tag rebel alliance, which is extremely diverse,’ he explained.
‘We have Princess Leia and Chewbacca and Han Solo – I sort of identify with Han Solo, as a capitalist – and there’s Luke Skywalker and there are some sort of bit-on-the-spectrum policy wonk people, they’re sort of like C-3PO,’ he continued.
The billionaire said the party needed to ‘find some unity in its diversity.’
Thiel also suggested that Republicans either offered too few or too many details about policies they want to implement.
In his talk at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California Tuesday night, Thiel never once mentioned the pull former President Donald Trump still held over the Republican Party
Thiel called the results of the 2022 midterms ‘depressing,’ as one of his friends Blake Masters (pictured) lost his Senate campaign in Arizona against Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly. Thiel financed Masters’ primary campaign against several GOP rivals
‘There was sort of a Mitch McConnell intuition that you shouldn’t talk about anything substantive at all, sort of a nihilistic, maybe a passive-aggressive form of nihilism or something like that … which is kind of uninspiring,’ Thiel said.
‘And then there was maybe his sort of a opposite problem, something like the detailed Paul Ryan policy wonkery, where you go into a lot of details, but somehow the ideas are unpopular and you’re checkmate on move one,’ he added.
As an example, he used Republicans trying to dismantle Obamacare, which President Barack Obama used as a way to win reelection over Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.
As the event was sponsored by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, Thiel talked about the electoral successes the Republicans had in the 1980s and what has happened since.
He said the party was a ‘big tent’ but united in a common purpose: to defeat Communism.
‘There is some sense in which if you say that we succeeded in defeating the evil empire that was the Soviet Union once and for all, there was also some sort of sense that the raison d’être got very eroded in the process,’ Thiel said.
But, he added ‘perhaps Communism is not fully defeated.’
From there, Thiel suggested the Republicans could see electoral victories again if they coalesced as a check against ‘red China.’
He pointed to some of the sinister things China has done in the tech industry and also to the outstanding questions about the origins of COVID-19.
‘I do not know if this sort of advice, if this sort of reorientation, a move away from co-dependency is going to translate immediately into fast victories,’ Thiel said.
‘It may not win you the last election or the next one, but you’ll be on the right side of history,’ he argued.
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