Top Silicon Valley Democrat Donor Switches Parties — Funds President Trump!

A tech leader from Silicon Valley has just contributed a whopping $1 MILLION donation to President Trump!

This year, tech adviser Jacob Helberg — who previously raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Biden’s 2020 election campaign and other Democrat candidates, like Pete Buttigieg — had a wake-up call.

Helberg, a Jew whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, cited the left’s anti-Israel stance as a big reason behind why he decided to leave the Democrat party.

He says he began to feel out-of-place among Democrats, who he described as becoming “incredibly militant.”

“I realized that I had a choice. I could either try to remain in the Democratic Party, to try to be a voice to bring it back to the center, or I could simply join a party that more closely aligned with my views,” Helberg said of his decision to switch parties and start donating to Trump’s campaign instead of Biden’s.

Check it out:

This one’s for Israel. 🇮🇱 🇺🇸 https://t.co/YR1lb0aM9Y

— Jacob Helberg (@jacobhelberg) May 15, 2024

“The social cost of supporting Trump isn’t as great as it was,” Helberg said of Silicon Valley society, many members of which see that “Trump was right on a lot of make-or-break issues for America.”https://t.co/4fLqsY7Inh#WalkAway pic.twitter.com/qKwpfsXBnH

— 🇺🇸🇺🇸Red White and True News🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@RWTNews) May 16, 2024

The Washington Post has more:

Four years ago, tech adviser Jacob Helberg was raising money within his elite circle for the losing presidential campaign of Democrat Pete Buttigieg.

But the pandemic, an artificial intelligence arms race against China, and taking up a crusade to ban TikTok in the United States began to shift his views and party allegiances, he says.

Today Helberg’s previously unreported $1 million donation to the Trump campaign shoots him into the upper echelon of the former president’s donors at a time when Donald Trump’s campaign trails President Biden’s in the money chase. Helberg is part of a small but influential cohort of tech leaders that have decided to back the former president — despite their own waffling and the industry’s broader hostility toward Trump.

In Silicon Valley, “the social cost of supporting Trump isn’t as great as it was,” Helberg said of his decision to switch parties. That was because “Trump was right on a lot of make-or-break issues for America.”

The bulk of Helberg’s contribution — $844,600 — went to the Trump 47 joint fundraising committee. At least 20 donors had donated the maximum amount of more than $800,000 to the Trump 47 committee by the end of March, according to the most recent reports available from the Federal Election Commission. Trump has been urging more donors to join that elite circle as he has appeared at several high-profile fundraisers over the past month-and-a-half. Helberg is the only publicly known maxed-out donor who hails from the tech world.

The Jewish Insider added:

When Jacob Helberg decided in 2020 to start making major political contributions for the first time, it was a no-brainer for him to choose Democrats. A tech expert who was beginning to make a name for himself in Silicon Valley, Helberg donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to President Joe Biden’s 2020 general election campaign and that of scores of other Democratic candidates.

Four years later, he’s still shaping up to be a big donor in this year’s presidential race, but this time to former President Donald Trump’s campaign. It’s a change that Helberg said has less to do with a shift in his own thinking than a shift in the Democratic Party that he does not support.

“It became very clear that an organizing principle on the left increasingly became based on a divvying up of the world between oppressors and oppressed,” said Helberg, who serves as a senior policy adviser to Alex Karp, CEO of the technology firm Palantir. “It’s just an organizing principle that I fundamentally disagree with.”

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Helberg has donated $1 million to Trump’s campaign so far this year, The Washington Post reported this week. He told Jewish Insider in an interview that much of the way he views politics comes down to his relationship with Judaism and the way he was raised: Helberg grew up in Paris, where his maternal grandparents moved after leaving Tunisia; his American father’s parents survived the Holocaust.

“I was struck by how America never had an awkward relationship toward religion or Jews, and I always found that to be such a breath of fresh air. I think everyone at the end of the day yearns to belong,” Helberg said.

But now, after Oct. 7, “for the first time in my lifetime, I feel like a lot of the thin crust of civilization that separates todays world from the dark world of yesterday is going to unravel in some really scary ways,” he said. “You’re seeing that with these incredibly dark, antisemitic protests on university campuses, in the streets of Dearborn, Mich., and these slogans that are somehow gaining popular attraction.”

In Helberg’s view, it is the younger generation of Democrats that is rising up the ranks in the party that became “incredibly militant,” and he began to feel out of place. He has cited many of the culture war issues that have become hot-button topics for conservatives lately — affirmative action, “wokism,” “anti-Western ideology.”

“I realized that I had a choice. I could either try to remain in the Democratic Party, to try to be a voice to bring it back to the center, or I could simply join a party that more closely aligned with my views,” said Helberg. Growing up as a Jew in Europe, he watched Jewish family members develop “thick skins” and simply deal with antisemitism.

“Im a big believer in the basic idea that life is always tough, and people shouldn’t throw themselves pity parties. I think they should do something about it,” he said, “which is ultimately why my basic approach has been, Im not going to stay in the Democratic Party and whine all day that Im completely out of step with everyone in my party.”