Perhaps what’s most stunning about Peter Thiel’s lack of self-awareness is that he’s yet to surmise that he’s an “elite living in a coastal bubble,” a charge he levels at those perturbed by his support for Donald Trump, the Worst American™. An immigrant from a country with a horrible, Holocaust-fueled past who’s able to look around the authoritarian, racist threats of an evidently unstable person clearly doesn’t see the burning forest for the trees, but this billionaire ideologue truly believes he understands the hearts and souls of Main Street. Well, he may understand the absolute worst of that block, but that’s more an accident of similarly damaged psyches.

There’s a thought by those who know him in Silicon Valley and can’t fathom his support for a hatemonger that Thiel possesses some hidden master plan that would explain his exhortation of a bigoted monster. I would guess this is a huge rationalization by a group of people unable to accept that one of their own is an unrepentant prick. Even if their theory is true, only the most hubristic troll can be so lost in his ludicrous theories that he can sit in his well-appointed living room and dream about tearing down America and rebuilding it in his own vision. The technologists who continue to stand by Thiel have a blind spot for him as capacious as the one he has for Trump.

What is Thiel’s grand design for recreating America? I don’t give a fuck, but Nick Bilton has a smart Vanity Fair “Hive” piece that tries to discern just that and reveals much about the investor’s psychology in the process. An excerpt:

The predominant theory in Silicon Valley about Thiel’s Trumpism—or at least the version you hear uttered the most in public—suggests it’s largely a personality tick. Thiel is “a contrarian,” as Jeff Bezos noted at last month’s Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit. Others have said that he just wants the attention. “What Peter has done, is not comprehensible to me,” Michael Lazerow, an investor, said to me. “I’ve yet to be able to figure out what Peter is supporting. It’s very clear about what he’s ignoring.” Lazerow went on to say that Trump’s policies are as erratic as his temperament, but his hatred is not. Thiel appears to be supporting the latter. And then there’s the theory of ego.

Thiel evidently approves of the attention he’s getting. (In the Times story, after all, he appeared quite aware of the “intensity” of the criticism he had provoked.) But there’s also another thesis floating around the Valley. “My belief is that Peter does not personally believe in Trump, but that he wants to create what I call the ‘burn it down party’,” investor Jason Calacanis told me. “Peter would like to see Trump win because it is the quickest way to break the two-party system and create Peter’s vision for America, which he is slowly unpacking.”

That theory, no matter how dystopian, may have some credence. Thiel, wittingly or not, has been articulating a very particular vision of late. During a speech at the National Press Club, Thiel hit on some familiar territory. He noted that the tech industry is deeply out of touch with the impact that their financially successful products have on the rest of the country. (This is one area where I actually agree with Thiel: in the Valley, a majority of pointless app founders are often too able to convince themselves that they have somehow “made the world a better place.”) In general, as Adam Davidson recently explained in The New Yorker, Thiel articulated a vision of national despair and ruin centered around inequality, student debt, and the trade deficit. “The protagonists in his national drama are Trump voters,” Davidson writes. “The villains are élites in their coastal bubbles of Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., who do not intend to tolerate the views of half this country.”

When Thiel is intellectually convinced of something—an idea, an injustice, a preference—he often seems unbothered by many of the smaller details or sensitivities or possible ramifications.•