Peter Thiel slams not very smart White House officials, warns of socialist democrat takeover

Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel dinged the Trump administration for having “not very smart” officials who are hindering the GOP’s chances in future elections, warning that they could be paving the way for a democratic socialist takeover.Thiel, who has close ties to the White House, also went into the harmful effects of AI doomerism as he shared his views on President Trump’s staffing issues.“The first administration brought in all these people who couldn’t agree, and it was just all this internal fighting,” Thiel said in a podcast shared Saturday.“The second administration I think had all these — they overcorrected for the mistake of the first term with all these loyalty tests,” he continued.“You got sort of, you know, an administration staffed by not very smart, but very loyal people.

And so, there are all sorts of ways it can be criticized.”The comments to Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner marked an unusual rebuke from Thiel, a leading Silicon Valley investor who famously took Vice President JD Vance under his wing before the protégé entered politics.Thiel, who last week received the “Axel Springer Award 2026” in Berlin, appeared to be referencing job interview questions that civil servants described as a “loyalty test” — which a judge blocked earlier this month.Thiel, and a strong supporter of Trump’s 2016 White House run, qualified his criticism a bit.“My fast answer is, you should ask me in 10 years or so, and we’ll see in 10 years how it all works out,” said the co-founder of Palantir, PayPal and the Founders Fund.Still, he sounded sour on short-term prospects for the US, saying Democrats will triumph in the November midterms — and the far-left branch of the party may even take the White House in 2028.“I would put the odds at roughly 50% that a democratic socialist wins the presidency in 2028,” he said,“When 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them...