Why Silicon Valley May Warm to Trump

In retrospect, President Barack Obama wasn’t the first high-tech president just because he had a personal relationship with technology. He was also the president who oversaw Silicon Valley’s reincarnation, from industrial accessory of the PC and E-commerce era to information sovereign in the age of iPhone and Facebook. The Obama Administration mostly supported the tech sector, implicitly or explicitly, and for worse as much as better.

Now that President-elect Donald Trump is heading to the White House, things are likely to change. And Silicon Valley is worried. In July, a hundred tech-industry business leaders condemned President-elect Trump publicly, largely on social justice grounds. After his election, fear of a Trump presidency sent the tech industry into a tailspin. A prominent investor called for California to secede from the union. But once the dust clears, Trump might prove eminently compatible with Silicon Valley’s ongoing project. And if that’s the case, the technology industry’s mask of affable, harmless progressivism is about to be pulled off forever.