The first time I heard someone ask the question, I thought they were being ironic. It was a couple of months ago, while sitting at the bar in the Southwest lounge at Oakland Airport. I’d briefly exchanged a few words with a man in his mid-30s sitting next to me—his name was Ron or Jon or something—a venture capitalist at a low-to-no-name firm (hence the Southwest terminal, and not a private-jet air field). After a brief chat about the tech bubble (my new temporary friend didn’t think there was one), we both stared off at the unappealing view of televisions hanging on the wall.
Nightly news anchors flashed back and forth to video of Donald Trump saying something ridiculous. Then my new friend took a sip of his airport pinot noir and asked, “Do you think Trump can be stopped from becoming president?”
Stopping Trump has become a fixation for Silicon Valley—an industry that holds itself responsible for changing the world and making it a better place. At Facebook’s recent F8 developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg paused during his discussion about drones and A.P.I.s in order to rebuke Trump’s demonic statements on immigration. “Most of my friends think he’s a fucking idiot,” a venture capitalist said onstage at a recent tech conference. Stopping Trump was one of the main topics at a secret meeting with billionaires, tech C.E.O.s (including Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Larry Page), and top members of the Republican establishment in March. And it’s the topic du jour anytime I speak to entrepreneurs, bloggers, or V.C.s up North.
But people in technology don’t simply fear Trump on account of the abhorrent and malevolent, and frankly horrific, things that he says. They’re also terrified about what he might do to the Land of Unicorns. “The main political belief here is money,” one San Francisco tech blogger told me last week. “And they’re all petrified that Trump could harm that.”
Indeed, they’re right. Trump has threatened to cut off the H-1B visa immigration program, which would impair Facebook’s and Google’s ability to hire brilliant new programmers from overseas. During the infamous Super Tuesday press conference, in which Chris Christie stood dumbfounded and dazed, the always thoughtful Trump declared, “I’m going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land!” (Where, of course, they would be exponentially more expensive to produce—and probably made by robots anyway.) When the F.B.I.-Apple-San Bernardino squabble occurred, in February, Trump even threatened to switch to a Samsung phone until Apple gave over the info. (This must have sent shockwaves through Cupertino.)
People in Silicon Valley offer a lot of explanations about how we got to this point. “It’s the media’s fault,” is one of the frequent comments you hear. Or: “Politicians are liars, and he is so popular because he speaks the truth.” Or: “He’s become more outlandish the more attention he gets.” And while those factors have undeniably played a role in Trump’s rise, they’re not the real reason he’s so popular.
The real reason, of course, is Silicon Valley.
But while Silicon Valley is dead set on stopping Trump, they are obstinately defensive about the fact that they facilitated his rise in the first place. “Stop him?” I replied in semi-wonderment to my new friend at the Oakland Airport bar. “If it wasn’t for Silicon Valley,”—pointing to the TV on the wall—“we wouldn’t even be talking about him right now; no one would.”
My new friend didn’t like my answer.
This isn’t the first time Trump has broached the idea of running for office. He has been trying to get into the White House (or the New York State Executive Mansion) since Mark Zuckerberg was still in middle school. Trump seriously started to explore the idea of running for president in 1998, and then ran in 2000 under the Reform Party. (He even won a few primaries.) He dipped his toe in the water in 2004 and again, in 2012.
He is no more perverse now than he was then. During his 2000 campaign, Trump was equally as petulant. He called Pat Buchanan “a Hitler lover.” He called his political opponents “losers.” His misogyny was equally fervent then, too. “A person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10,” he once told Howard Stern. He said his ex-wife had “nice tits, no brains.”
I’ve heard people say that if it wasn’t for CNN, FOX, and a dozen other television outlets that have “handed Trump the microphone,” there would be no Trump. But with all due respect to the television media, they’re just not that important anymore. Perhaps his popularity is a result of a broken political system, others suggest. But let’s be realistic, people have always believed the system is broken. (It’s that same broken system, it should be noted, that has helped create many of the disruptive unicorns in Silicon Valley.)
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The only thing that’s really changed between Trump’s other attempts to run for office and now is the advent of social media. And Trump, who has spent his life offending people, knows exactly how to bend it to his will. Just look at what happens if someone says something even remotely politically incorrect today: the online immune system, known famously as a Twitter mob, sets in to hold that person accountable. These mobs demand results, like seeing someone fired, making them shamefully apologize, or even seeing their life torn to shreds.
Yet someone like Donald Trump doesn’t get fired, or apologize, which only makes the mobs grow more fervent and voluble. And the louder they get, the more the news media covers the backlash. The more the TV shows talk about him, the more we all talk about him. If you want to truly comprehend why Trump is so popular, you just have to behold what people are saying in 140 characters or less. It’s the same thing Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and anyone else who wants attention, understand. If we’re talking about them, they’re winning the war for attention. No one knows this better than Trump. Prod the social-media tiger, you get attention: say Mexicans are rapists, make fun of the disabled, pick a fight with the Pope, attack women, call the media dumb, and social media shines a big, bright spotlight on Donald.
Arianna Huffington may have once famously decided to cover Trump in the entertainment section of the Huffington Post, but the reality is we now live in a world where there is no line between entertainment, politics, and media. And I know Silicon Valley knows this, because they are the ones that helped eviscerate it. (Hello, BuzzFeed.) The only way, it seems, that the tech world can help stop Donald Trump from becoming the Republican nominee, and possibly even the president of the United States, is not by discussing in private how to halt his vertiginous climb from bloviating billionaire to the man who could be sitting in the White House, but rather to pull the plug on social media until this election cycle is over.
Outlandish idea? Sure. But so is the idea that the people in Silicon Valley are wondering how to stop Trump, instead of realizing that they were the ones who created him in the first place.
For all their forward-thinking, it’s baffling that so few in the Valley seem to understand how people will use the innovations that they create. I was in the room when 3-D printers were being realized, and I watched as people sat around talking about all the wonderful things we’d now be able to make in our homes, like plastic forks and wall hooks and personalized iPhone cases. And yet, once you could buy a 3-D printer, what did people use them for? To build fully functional plastic guns.
The founders of YouTube thought they were creating a destination for people to record themselves having a good time (“Me at the zoo”), and have their own online channel. They didn’t anticipate that Jihadi John would use it to broadcast journalist beheadings. Facebook was a place to connect with people—and, as some in the Valley like to remind you, it was largely responsible for Barack Obama’s 2008 election—and yet others use it to buy and sell guns, recruit ISIS members, and share stories about how horrible, or wonderful, Donald Trump is.
Or look at Periscope, where people stream themselves sleeping or playing video games, which was recently used to live-stream an alleged rape, where the 18-year-old responsible for documenting the act told prosecutors she kept filming because “she became enthralled by positive feedback online.” And then there’s Twitter, which was founded by a group of young men who wanted to feel less alone and, perhaps, share with friends what they were doing on a Friday night. Now it is the hotbed for hatred, a place where you can be eviscerated for anything, or where Trump makes puerile faces at the cage to get attention. On Twitter, Trump is already president.
Last week, when news broke that employees at Facebook asked Zuckerberg if the company had a responsibility to stop Trump, perhaps truly making the world a better place, it was Trump’s answer that seemed to explain why that could never happen. “I like Facebook, and I’m very successful on Facebook,” Trump said in an interview before touting how many followers he has on the platform (7 million compared to Clinton’s 3.2 million). “No one else is even close to that.” Sadly, he’s right.
