Peter Thiel thinks Donald Trump can fix America's incompetent elites. He's wrong.

Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor, is one of Donald Trump's most surprising supporters. Silicon Valley's self-consciously (and often self-righteously) "open" ethos is perhaps the starkest contrast to Trump's nationalist pitch. Thiel describes himself as a libertarian, which seems like the tendency most opposed to Trump's quasi-reactionary populism.

But, as a man who takes pride in contrarian bets, and who became one of the world's wealthiest men and one of its most prominent public intellectuals because of those contrarian bets, Thiel is sticking by his contrarian bet on Trump. In an op-ed in the Washington Post this week, Thiel lambasted the incompetence of government and proposed Trump as the best solution for our stagnation.

I disagree with Thiel here, but given that he is both an insightful and original thinker, it's worth trying to understand his thought process in endorsing someone so reviled by so many people, especially in the intellectual class.

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Government used to be able to accomplish things, Thiel laments in his op-ed. Things like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project. Now the F-35 fighter is a piece of junk than costs more than the Apollo Project. Both parties are stuck in a false dichotomy, arguing about the size of government, when what matters is effectiveness: "The right is obsessed with tax cuts, and the left is obsessed with funding increases," Thiel says. "Trump's heretical denial of Republican dogma about government incapacity is exactly what we need to move the party — and the country — in a new direction. For the Republican Party to be a credible alternative to the Democrats' enabling, it must stand for effective government, not for giving up on government."

Reading between the lines a bit, we can see a not uncommon argument for Trump here: Whatever Trump's personal faults are, they are worth it, because of the hypocrisies and fault lines he's laid bare. As Thiel says: "We can't expect the government to get the job done until voters can say [...] to the incompetent elites who feel entitled to govern: 'You're fired.'"

Thiel probably sees in the Trump movement and its discombobulation of the GOP an opportunity to rebuild the GOP into something closer to his own views, even if those views aren't actually Trump's. Tactically, that might be sound. After all, no one knows what the GOP will look like after November.

But as a card-carrying #NeverTrump conservative, Thiel's column gives me the same strange feeling as many other justifications from smart Trump supporters. It's full of legitimate points and grievances, until it gets to the part where they say: "...and therefore, Trump is the answer."

While it is a wonderful thing that the Trump candidacy has finally put the plight of the white working class front and center, there's no reason to think a President Trump would be a better champion of the white working class than would a bag of charcoal, or a penguin.

Thiel is right in saying that more government competence is sorely needed, and his point that government effectiveness matters more than size is an important one. But as a shrewd businessman himself, surely he knows that Trump is pretty much the opposite of competent, as witnessed by, if not his entire record as a businessman, then his perpetual capability to shoot himself in the foot throughout his entire campaign, while simultaneously putting said foot in his mouth.

Like many Trump supporters, Thiel is right in asserting that elites — both within the GOP and in American society at large — are incompetent, corrupt, and in dire need of a shakeup and a kick in the rear. But Donald Trump remains a psychologically unstable buffoon, and whatever virtues the Trump movement may end up having still do not change the fact that he should not be allowed near the presidency.