Give it time. Trump's undoing is going to be Trump.

For months, Judge Juan Merchan gave Donald Trump a reprieve; stuck in a New York courtroom, he effectively protected Trump from himself, as the candidate had little time to get out on the campaign trail. Well, those days are over, and this week in Nevada, memories of the rambling, incoherent chaos that was the Trump presidency came roaring back. With his teleprompter down, Trump reminded viewers of who he is, and gave them a glimpse of what is to come. It was not pretty. 

Maybe someone should send a video clip of Trump’s Las Vegas rally to Jacob Helberg, to remind him who he has signed up for. Helberg, a prominent voice in the tech community who formerly supported Democrats, made waves last month when he gave $1 million to Donald Trump’s campaign. Eight years ago, it was a big deal when PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel joined the Trump team, and few in the tech community chose to follow his lead. But this time around, the same week that Trump added convicted felon to his resume, a number of tech funders joined Helberg in hopping on the Trump train.

Donald Trump told us early on that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and his supporters would stand by him. It seemed like so much bluster at the time, but no longer. Now that he is an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon, the ferocity of his supporters rallying around him has reached new heights. It is hard to remember the before-times, when Congressional Republicans recoiled in collective horror at hearing Trump’s words on the Access Hollywood tape about something that in retrospect seems like small potatoes. Seven years later, those same Republicans barely blinked when Federal District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan took pains to explain that Trump had indeed raped E. Jean Carroll. 

For some reason, Trump being a convicted felon sticks in their craw in a way being a rapist never did. The outrage since his conviction has been titanic, as the GOP amen chorus rose as one, prepped in advance by the Trump campaign. The trial overseen by Judge Merchan was worse than the show trials in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton tweeted. “This is what you see in communist countries,” Florida Senator and Trump VP-wannabe Marco Rubio declared: “It happened in the days after the Castro revolution.” Hyperbole in TrumpWorld knows no bounds. 

I understand the moral depravity of senators who are incapable of standing up to Donald Trump, even as they disdain him behind closed doors. As Teddy Roosevelt famously observed about politics, "If you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." But leaders of the tech community opening their wallets for Trump have no such excuse. 

Those tech community leaders are, almost to a person, poster children for the American dream: first and second generation Americans who, one might imagine, would hold the institutions of democracy in particularly high regard that Donald Trump is working so assiduously to destroy. A number of them, like Helberg, are married gay men, yet they have chosen to join the Trump campaign, knowing full well that his evangelical core supporters have moved on from Roe v. Wade, and have every intention of using their clout during a second Trump administration to overturn the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that provides federal protection to gay marriage.

So what changed? Unlike Congressional Republicans, Helberg and his colleagues feigned no outrage at the New York verdict, and made no effort to justify their support by making Trump out to be someone he isn’t. They did not need 12 jurors to tell them who Trump is. They saw the insurrection, the effort to steal the election and to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. With the exception of Peter Thiel, the tech community stood largely unified in opposition to Trump in 2016, and again four years ago. Indeed, when Thiel endorsed Trump in 2016, Helberg’s husband, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Keith Rabois, deemed Trump a “sociopath,” unfit to serve as president.

Today, the climate is far more accepting of Trump’s candidacy. Rabois is working to elect Republicans to Congress, and feels it is impossible for him to vote for Biden, even if he has not softened his view of Trump. It is easy to point to Trump’s pledge to renew his tax cuts, which expire next year, and the counterpoint of Biden seeking an array of new taxes that would impact Silicon Valley, as the driving force behind the defection of some in the tech community away from Democrats. But that appears to ignore the range of motivations involved, as the issues impacting the tech world are becoming increasingly complex, involving international issues surrounding intellectual property, and how the worlds of venture capital and artificial intelligence should be regulated.

Whatever their policy differences with the Biden administration, for many, the path back to Donald Trump’s door may well have been made easier by the hostility toward many in the tech sector from the Democratic left. As one tech leader who continues to support Joe Biden commented recently, “If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that. I see that in venture capital.”

The alienation of former allies has to be viewed as a self-inflicted wound by Democrats. It has become a habit of sorts for Democrats to feel free to demonize people – Wall Street, white men, and the wealthy come to mind – and then wonder why they lose their votes and campaign contributions when elections roll around. 

In the meantime, the Biden campaign’s trump card may turn out to be Trump himself. It is hard to watch his rally in Las Vegas, and not have all the memories come flooding back. Perhaps Jacob Helberg and Keith Rabois will reflect on that and remember why they viewed Trump as they once did. Nothing has changed; it's just that it has been so long since Trump has been free to roam the world, many people appear to have forgotten exactly who he is.