Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, reportedly said he wished he’d made Former President Donald Trump an “actual martyr” just days before an attempted assassination of Trump.
Hoffman made the remark to his former classmate Peter Thiel when the two recently attended a conference in Idaho, according to Puck News.
Thiel, a billionaire tech investor, thanked Hoffman for funding one of the many lawsuits against Trump, saying it turned the former president into a martyr and increased his chances of reelection this November.
Hoffman reportedly responded, “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”
Just days after that exchange, Trump was shot during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The former president was hit in his right ear, while others in attendance were injured and one man was killed.
After the incident, Hoffman took to X, formerly Twitter, to defend his comments.
“It is abhorrent that anyone has tried to assassinate President Trump,” Hoffman wrote. “Everyone, on all sides of this election, should condemn political violence loudly and publicly.”
The post, however, went on to compare the political violence committed against the former president to Jan. 6.
“Instead of calling the January 6th insurrectionists ‘heroes’ whom he [Trump] intends to pardon and even hire into government, he should speak out against political violence,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman issued a clarification of his comments in the same post, asserting that he hoped Trump “would martyr himself,” not that he wanted Trump to die.
“Of course I meant nothing about any sort of physical harm or violence, which I categorically deplore,” Hoffman said. “I meant and mean accountability to the rule of law, such as unanimous guilty felony verdict by 12 jurors on 34 counts and an $84 million judgment for slander and lies about his sexual assault.”
Democrats have spent years running an “assassination prep” campaign against Trump.
“Your very attempt to ‘both sides’ it reveals your insincerity,” said Megyn Kelly in a post on X. “I have multiple sources who were in the room when you said it and everyone took away the same meaning: you wanted Trump dead. You’re not fooling anyone.”
Hoffman is also investing millions into a lawsuit to silence election reporting, and Dmitri Mehlhorn, an adviser to the billionaire, reportedly emailed reporters suggesting that the attempted assassination may have been staged.
The email said the “possibility — which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally — is that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash,” according to Semafor.
Mehlhorn noted in a recent private conference call that “Reid and I [Mehlhorn] have invested nine figures of our own money to prevent Trump from getting back into office,” Semafor reported.
