BY SRH
Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir (PLTR), who was the first major tech investor to support Trump in 2016 and the largest funder of super PACs behind JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign, has also drawn a line in the sand over Trump’s defining foreign-policy gamble. We previously reported that Donald Trump Jr. had privately broken with his Dad over the Iran war.
According to audio from a private talk in Nashville on October 12 that Decoded by POLITICO (Calder McHugh) was able to secure, Thiel informed the audience:
“I don’t think we should have gone to war, and I have doubts about it. Numerous errors were committed.
“Perhaps we lack the hard power. We might not win the struggle of soft power.
Put differently, one of the MAGA-tech alliance’s architects now believes that the war was a mistake and that America might not be able to complete it. Overnight, the scoop crossed:
🚨🇺🇸🇮🇷 One of Trump’s most powerful billionaire supporters, Peter Thiel, claims the Iran war was a mistake.
“In my opinion, we shouldn’t have done it. Numerous errors were committed.
The remarks were made by Thiel at a Nashville private speech last week.
“I think we should not have done it” is Thiel’s statement regarding the war in Iran. October 22, 2026 — Alex Burns (@alexanderburns) https://t.co/0JG5vUcY0r
We go over Thiel’s remarks, the lecture’s even crazier passages, and why “The Sword of Damocles” comes at the wrong time for the White House below.
According to Politico, Thiel drew on Rumsfeld and Cheney to discuss the International Criminal Court’s “unchecked power” for the most of the talk before stating the following:
“I interpreted the Cheney family’s Trump derangement syndrome as an effort to evade indictment by gaining favor with the International Criminal Court. It’s probably too late, and I’ve started to believe that the Trump administration’s attempts to pursue this war in Iran are being threatened by an ICC arrest warrant.
The phrase “persecute” appears in Politico’s transcript. We believe he meant “prosecute,” but who knows at this stage of the conflict.) Translation: The president’s most astute supporter is openly speculating that Trump officials may be exposed for war crimes. Very comforting.
Thiel also described asking Benjamin Netanyahu about Israel’s plans for Gaza during a meeting in early 2024 following October 7. “I can’t just Dresdenize it,” Netanyahu responded, referring to the Allied firebombing that killed almost 25,000 people, according to Thiel.
Remaining (kind of) on Team Trump
Thiel didn’t defect, to be fair. He “highlighted his continued support of Trump and suggested he wanted to protect the president,” according to Politico, framing his criticism as opposition to Middle East conflicts and neoconservatives rather than Trump specifically. This is the Vance-wing viewpoint, and Politico stated in March that Vance was “skeptical” about attacking Iran prior to the start of the conflict.
Politico received no response from the White House or Thiel’s agents. In other words, the audio was released 12 days prior to the November 3 midterms, and it represents the coalition’s restrainer wing speaking in secret what it cannot say from the stage.
Are You Sick Yet?,Trump’s The Problem!
No one is surprised or surprised that King Donald Trump has long desired to bar accredited members of the media from entering the White House grounds. He likely views this as a power move that would force reporters, whose attention he craves, to beg for a chance to be near him. He would certainly make use of a small doggie door similar to the one outside Mr. Burns’ office if it meant that any reporter could reach him. Reportedly entertained by luminaries like Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus, who was sacked after six months as chief of staff, Trump has been contemplating the concept of expelling all media from the White House premises since his first term. In September, he arbitrarily banned reporters from CNN, Politico, and MS NOW, leading to a boycott by the rest of the press pool and a swift overturn by a federal judge. This was an outgrowth of some of these tendencies.
There More BS…
The idea that Trump has reportedly always intended to build a swimming pool in the spot where the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room has been since 1969 is just now starting to trickle down to me. Which one is it? I’m confused. Would you like an indoor pool for the White House, King Trump? That spot on the South Lawn where there is already an outdoor pool? The renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has only gotten worse with each passing month; is this some sort of elaborate attempt to cover it up?
As it turns out, however, those familiar with White House lore will know that the location actually did originally serve as a pool. No less than Franklin D. Roosevelt originally had the White House pool installed in this location, intended as a therapeutic for his legs, long since weakened by polio. The pool remained until renovations in 1969, when the Nixon administration first covered over the pool and turned the room into the White House’s first full-time space dedicated to press briefings, which also served to establish the modern White House press corps. Since then, the idea of moving the press out of the White House has actually been floated a few other times, including by Hillary Clinton during her husband’s first term as President, and Hillary also apparently desired to convert that space back into a pool, according to a memoir of then White House communications director George Stephanopoulos. Negative press reaction to those rumored plans, however, quickly put the kibosh on any possibility that the free press would lose their permanent hub within the White House.
In the era of King Trump, however, idle threats to demolish historic portions of the White House can’t ever be discounted, because you never know when construction crews are simply going to show up with sledgehammers and start swinging, lawsuits and judge orders be damned. And Trump seems particularly taken with the ability in this plan to BOTH inflict humiliation on an entire sector he narcissistically believes lacks fealty to him in the media, AND pay lip service to restoring a classic White House feature built by one of the handful of Presidents he himself described as “great” in a meme he posted ranking POTUSes. Why, exactly would Trump revere FDR, one might wonder? I think it’s safe to say that it’s likely nothing more than name recognition and the fact that FDR served his record-length presidency in turbulent (and famous) times. But I can only imagine, given Trump’s recent meme posting on Truth Social, that he loves the idea of being able to punish reporters while simultaneously falling back on the vague idea of “FDR” as an excuse to build the most hideously garish indoor pool ever conceived. Just look at this image he recently posted, and get into that Trumpian headspace.
