Peter Thiel Defends His Donald Trump Endorsement to the National Press Club: Watch

Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and board member for Facebook, defended his controversial support of the Donald Trump's presidential campaign before the National Press Club Monday morning.

The controversial Silicon Valley bigwig donated $1.25 million to the Republican nominee.

Thiel has also come under heavy criticism for his endorsement this year. Critics recently forced Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, to respond to demands that Thiel be removed from the social network's board. Zuckerberg defended Thiel's position within the company, citing the importance of accepting divergent views.

“I don't agree with everything he has said and done,” Thiel said, referring to Trump's many gaffes, incendiary comments and controversial history.

"His larger-than-life persona attracts a lot of attention," he continued. "Nobody would suggest Donald Trump is a humble man. But the big things he's right about amount to a much needed dose of humility in our politics. Very unusually for a presidential candidate, he has questioned the very concept of American exceptionalism."

He also found room to praise Trump voters, who he feels have been unfairly maligned.

"It's not a lack of judgment that leads Americans to vote for Trump; we're voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed," he said.

But it's not only neglected or struggling conservatives that Thiel found time to defend. He showed compassion for a group so often misunderstood in modern times: the modest multi-millionaires.

"If you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system," Thiel sympathetically noted. He was defending his recent charitable donation to a small legal battle that happened to bankrupt Gawker media, which had published a sex tape of the professional wrestler. In an event that was presumably completely unrelated, Gawker also outed Thiel as gay in 2007.

Some have expressed surprise over the investor's support for Trump. As the first openly gay speaker at Republican National Convention, he stands out from his Silicon Valley peers who support Democrats by large margins.

But Thiel shares an adversarial disposition toward media companies with Trump, who has threatened lawsuits against multiple news agencies this election cycle. This gave the speech a certain irony, given that the National Press Club is a professional organization for journalists.

Thiel also is widely known to be a libertarian, stressing the fallibility of government and the virtues of business and free enterprise.

And he seems to share Trump's dire view of the United States.

"No matter how crazy this election seems, it is less crazy than the condition of our country," Thiel said.

Low retirement savings, high prescription drug costs and rising tuition rates featured heavily in Thiel's critique of the status quo. He also cited reckless foreign policy, the 2008financial crisis and a blindness to the costs of free trade a the failings of the American elite.

But his case for Trump largely seemed to be an argument against current leadership. He failed to mention many of the problems Trump claims to care most about, such as the ominous job-stealing immigrants or a supposed spike in the crime rate. When pressed during a question period, Thiel claimed mass incarceration as one of the most significant challenges facing the United States.

Trump, on the other hand, seems hardly concerned that his country locks up a larger percent of its population than any other nation. Instead, he declares himself the "law and order" candidate.

For Thiel, other conservatives have failed because they rail too much against the capabilities of government, while ignoring the ways in which it has succeeded in the past.

"The Manhattan Project, the interstate highway system, the Apollo program," he said. "Whatever you think of these ventures, you cannot doubt the competence of the government that got them done. But we have fallen very far from that standard."

Apparently, he thinks Trump is the one who can pick us back up.

Watch the video below:

Photo source: YouTube screen shot