The Republican Party Official platform For the 2024 election, he is even more explicit, promising to reverse the Biden administration’s early efforts to ensure AI safety and “defend the right to mine Bitcoin.”
All of these changes would conveniently benefit some of Trump’s most prominent and vocal supporters in Silicon Valley. Trump’s running mate, Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, has long-standing connections to the tech industry, notably through his former employer, billionaire Palantir founder and longtime Trump supporter Peter Thiel. (Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founder’s Fund invested $200 million in cryptocurrencies at the beginning of this year.)
Thiel is one of a number of Silicon Valley heavyweights who have recently thrown their support behind Trump. In the past month, Elon Musk and David Sacks have both openly expressed their support for the former president. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose firm a16z has invested in several cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence startups, have also saying They will be donating to the Trump campaign.
“They see it as an opportunity to avoid future regulation,” Haworth says. “They are buying the ability to avoid oversight.”
Reporting from Bloomberg discovered that some sections of Project 2025 were written by people who have worked or lobbied for companies like Meta, Amazon, and undisclosed bitcoin companies. Both Trump and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have courted donors in the cryptocurrency space, and in May, the Trump campaign announced it would accept cryptocurrency donations.
But Project 2025 wouldn’t necessarily favor all tech companies. In the document, the authors accuse big tech companies of trying to “push diverse political viewpoints out of the digital public square.” The plan supports legislation that would remove immunities granted to social media platforms by Section 230, which protects companies from being held legally liable for user-generated content on their sites, and promotes “anti-discrimination” policies that “prohibit discrimination against fundamental political viewpoints.”
It would also seek to impose transparency rules on social platforms, saying the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “could require these platforms to provide greater specificity regarding their terms of service, and could hold them accountable by prohibiting actions that are inconsistent with those clear and particular terms.”
And despite Trump’s own promise to bring back TikTok, Project 2025 suggests that the administration “ban all Chinese social media apps like TikTok and WeChat, which pose significant national security risks and expose American consumers to data and identity theft.”
West says the plan is full of contradictions when it comes to its approach to regulation. It is also, he says, notably soft on industries in which tech billionaires and venture capitalists have invested significant money, namely artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. “Project 2025 is not just a policy statement, but a fundraising vehicle,” he says. “So I think the monetary aspect is important in terms of helping to resolve some of the apparent inconsistencies in the regulatory approach.”
It remains to be seen what impact Project 2025 might have on a future Republican administration. On Tuesday, Paul Dans, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, LowAlthough Trump himself has tried to distance himself from the plan, reports from the Wall Street Journal indicates that while the project may have a lower profile, it won’t go away. Instead, the Heritage Foundation is shifting its focus toward building a roster of conservative staffers who could be hired in a Republican administration to execute the party’s vision.