By Erica C. Barnett
During his remarks at the Downtown Seattle Association’s State of Downtown event on Tuesday, Mayor Bruce Harrell appeared to praise President Trump for bringing “smart innovators” like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks into his inner circle at the White House.
“We know that our current president surrounds himself by some of the smartest innovators around,” Harrell said. “When we drop names like [Marc] Andreessen or Peter Thiel or David Sacks or Elon Musk—these are smart innovators.”
Harrell, who noted a moment later that he had gone “off script,” had been talking about cybersecurity, potential threats from AI, and competition with China. He also noted that “the FCC is run by Brendan Carr, who did write the playbook for the FCC chapter in Project 25,” and said he got “emotional” about layoffs at the National Institute of Standards in Technology, which Wired describes as an “agency responsible for establishing benchmarks that ensure everything from beauty products to quantum computers are safe and reliable.”
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Mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen said Harrell was actually criticizing Trump and his tech advisors.
“The mayor was not praising them, he was referencing they have an objective reputation as leaders in technology and innovation, and that it is a danger they are in the president’s orbit,” Housen said. “He certainly doesn’t agree with their politics, which is why he highlighted this through concerns around the actions coming out of DC like significant staffing cuts impacting cybersecurity and the degradation of protections and questions over access to personal data.”
Marc Andreessen is a tech mogul who co-founded Netscape and is now one of Trump’s top tech advisors. Palantir founder Peter Thiel, who’s probably best known for funding the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that doomed Gawker, was one of Trump’s earliest tech supporters. David Sacks is a Paypal co-founder who is now Trump’s “crypto czar.”
Tuesday’s event was not the first time Harrell has had seemingly conciliatory words for the Trump Administration while speaking to a business group. During a Washington Technology Industry Association event after the election last year, Harrell said he was not “not going to D.C. with my fist balled,” adding, “I look for opportunities … no matter who’s in the White House.”
Harrell spent the first five minutes of his recent State of the City speech (which we discussed on Seattle Nice last week) blasting Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, funding cuts, “unconstitutional executive orders,” and anti-DEI policies.
