REUTERS
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman found himself in hot water Sunday following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump over prior comments he made wishing that the former president was an “actual martyr.”
The Democratic super-donor, in a post on X, tried to clean up the inflammatory remarks he made last week while telling the audience at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference that he and fellow tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel had a falling out due to a “moral issue” — Thiel’s backing of Trump, according to a Friday report in Puck News.
Thiel, who was in the audience at the panel, spoke up and sarcastically thanked thanked Hoffman for putting money behind lawsuits against Trump, saying that the legal action had turned the 45th president into “martyr.”
“Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr,” Hoffman reportedly replied.
In light of the attempt on Trump’s life during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania Saturday, Hoffman clarified the remarks, while saying he was “horrified and saddened” by the shooting and wishing Trump a quick recovery.
“Peter Thiel said that my lawsuit work against Trump was ‘turning a clown into a martyr.’ In that context, I replied that I wished that Trump would martyr himself — meaning let himself be held accountable,” Hoffman wrote on X in reference to Trump’s legal problems, including his criminal conviction in Manhattan for falsifying business records and other pending cases against him.
“Of course I meant nothing about any sort of physical harm or violence, which I categorically deplore,” Hoffman added.
A top Hoffman advisor, Dmitri Mehlhorn, on Sunday issued a different mea culpa after he wrote in an email to some journalists that the shooting in Pennsylvania “was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash,” according to Semafor.
Mehlhorn, who also donates to Democrats, co-founded a fund labeled “Investing in the US” with Hoffman.
While he raised the prospect that a “crazy anti-Trumper” might have shot at the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, Mehlhorn was reportedly more invested in the “staged” theory.
“I know it feels yucky to discuss such a possibility,” he wrote, according to the report. “But in this case, the odds are so high, and the stakes are so consequential, we must as[k] the question.”
Mehlhorn said in another message Sunday that he regretting sending the email and condemned political violence.
“It was drafted and sent without consultation from team members or allies,” he wrote, per Semafor. “I have apologized to them directly. I also want to apologize publicly, without reservation, for allowing my words to distract from last night’s central fact: political violence took yet another innocent American life last night.”
Mehlhorn wasn’t the only one to suggest the shooting wasn’t real. Droves of social media users also suggested the wild theory in the aftermath of the gunfire.
Trump was one of four people shot during the rally when 20-year-old gunman Thomas Crooks opened fire. Hero firefighter Corey Comperatore was the sole fatal victim.