Thiel On Trump's Brashness: It's 'Better Than Telling Beautiful Lies About The Way The Country Is Working'

"I got to meet a lot of people running for president on the U.S. Republican side in 2016 and they all felt like zombies," he said during a Monday event on entrepreneurship in Sao Paulo, Brazil. "They couldn’t say anything different other than programmed ideological soundbites." Trump, Thiel said, is "a very healthy corrective to that."

"I fully understand why people think of President Trump as a rude, mean person," Thiel said. "But I think that’s often better than telling beautiful lies about the way the country is working."

Once among the most vocal of Trump supporters, Thiel has been conspicuously silent for the past year on issues relating to the president and his performance.

Peter Thiel On Backing Trump: The Establishment 'Glosses Over' All The Problems In Our Society https://t.co/LK4dOWHZgI

— LarryD. Knepper 🎈 (@LDknepper) July 31, 2018

[...] Thiel on Monday also said that "with all the flaws, all the challenges the Trump administration’s had, I believe it was incredibly important to articulate certain things about how our political institutions and our society were not working as well as before."

Q: At some point, you described that the last presidential election felt like an apocalyptic battle. What exactly did you feel was at stake?

THIEL: There are these essays by a person called Michael Anton. They are all written pseudonymously because he felt it was too dangerous to write names. One of them was titled “The Flight 93 Election”. Flight 93 was one of the four flights that was hijacked after 9/11 but it was the one where the passengers took over, they charged the cockpit – plane still crashed. And it was like that it felt that the country had been taken over and it was on a catastrophic trajectory, that people were going to try to charge the cockpit. It didn’t mean that they would be able to ride the plane or the ship or whatever the metaphor is, but “we’re gonna try”. So I do think that “The Flight 93 Election” is a powerful metaphor and, emotionally, that certainly resonated with me.

Q: What is the explanatory power of this metaphor?

THIEL: It is this very deep sense that the United States – the western world as a whole – are not progressing in the direction they should. We have a center-left establishment in both Western Europe and the US that mainly glosses over all the short- and long-term problems in our societies. And if something is not done, at some point it becomes too late to fix things. And the hour was very late.