alt Hacker NewsIt wasn't that big of a mistake:
1. Trump retaliates against businesses which aren't 100% for him.
2. The amount of money (a few hundred million dollars or whatever spent on the election) was relatively small in Silicon Valley terms.
3. The Democratic politicians won't hold grudges: they will now happily accept all the new cash soon to come from Silicon Valley.
4. The hostility from the public is not because of Silicon Valley's association with Trump; instead it is because of issues like higher electricity rates, loss of privacy, job losses, etc.
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#3 is not a given. That money is poison. If Mississippi can go blue then new york can go red. We're just entering a less polarized era of politics. Things have been trending in that direction every election this decade.
One of the things that Americans broadly agree on right now is data centers can go to hell and data centers are just a proxy for tech. Democrats won in primaries and the general by being outspent. Not while being outspent. By being outspent. Just accepting particular categories of donor money sunk primary campaigns and the general in e.g. Texas turned into a referendum on the donors.
Politicians' driving motivation is getting re elected. If that money is toxic they're not touching it. If democrats turned around in Ohio and Texas and accepted data center money after rage against them was specifically the one thing that got them into office, you think they have a snowballs chance in hell of keeping those seats? The GOP just ran that experiment. They betrayed the like specific things said they'd do, and got rewarded with a comical amount of donor money, and fricking Blansas Blexas Blississippi because it turned out voters were like no but we were serious about that tho
Costco did not bend the knee on the anti DEI freak out the GOP went on in 2025 and did not suffer any consequences from Trump admin. Target and Apple couldn’t get on their knees quickly enough and Apple went embarrassingly low.
> The hostility from the public is not because of Silicon Valley's association with Trump; instead it is because of issues like higher electricity rates, loss of privacy, job losses, etc.
Why not both? Or rather, all?
> Democratic politicians won't hold grudges: they will now happily accept all the new cash soon to come from Silicon Valley
I think one could single handed defeat a Democrat in a primary based on their receiving funds from certain now-verboten Silicon Valley names.