How Silicon Valley Humiliated the Democrats

When will they learn? The party remains far too solicitous of an industry that’s rewarded their fealty with four years of Trump and untold damage to democracy.

For decades, democratic leadership has tried to market its willingness to craft pro-corporate policy as political sophistication. Last summer, 2028 presidential hopeful Ruben Gallego championed the GENIUS Act, a bill that deregulates parts of the cryptocurrency industry, which directly benefits one of Trump’s crypto firms. At a 2025 forum, Gallego repeated a vague, starry-eyed, crypto industry talking point, saying of an industry whose customers lost an estimated $17 billion that year due to scams; saying of crypto, “It’s like seeing the advent of the internet and social media again.”

Democrats’ eagerness to please industry is also evident in the past few years of revolving-door hires from the Beltway to Big Tech: President Barack Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney spent seven years at Amazon and now works at Airbnb. The Coinbase advisory council is stacked with a dozen Democrats, including Tim Ryan and Biden’s pollster John Anzalone. Stephanie Cutter, a key Democratic comms strategist and Sunday show mainstay, is now at the gambling firm (they refer to themselves as “prediction markets”) Kalshi. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Kelly, who worked in the Biden White House in artificial intelligence is now at Anthropic.

The open courting of Big Tech and Big Finance by Democratic leadership has always been sold as savvy. But after a series of bruising election losses and open hostility from the industries they once hoped to court, the strategy has done little but make the Democrats look more like impressionable rubes.

Despite wild claims by venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen that the Biden administration was their adversary, the Biden White House desperately wanted to be liked by Silicon Valley—and monied venture capitalists in particular. I worked in the Biden........

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