Which I think Marco sums up well saying, someone who says what Trump is saying could not be associated with YC, and donating over $1m is saying you strongly support what Trump is saying.
IMO saying you shouldn't fire someone over politics, shouldn't be a free pass to support ANYTHING, including things antithetical to basic human values or YC values/interests, if it happens to be from a presidential candidate.
There's no inconsistency between, on the one hand, repudiating Thiel's material support of Trump and, on the other hand, figuring out how to engage Trump supporters and their issues going forward.
The former helps prevent an immediate bad event, the latter builds a future in which America is less likely to fragment further and leave more people on the outside.
Nowhere in these does anybody stop talking to anyone. Altman talks to Thiel and publically disavows Thiel's support of Trump. Altman puts his own considerable resources and thought into talking with Trump supporters to see what's up with them, really. Everybody's talking. Granted, the conversations aren't easy, but they're talking.
If Trump is bad, he's a symptom more than a disease. Shunning Republicans isn't going to change their mind, it's going to drive them to echo chambers like /r/the_donald where they will have their beliefs reinforced, not challenged.
The way we got into a situation with Trump as a major party nominee in the first place was by not talking to people who are very different than we are. The polarization of the country into two parallel political realities is not good for any of us. We should talk to each other more, not less.
We should all feel a duty to try to understand the roughly half of the country that thinks we are severely misguided. I don’t understand how 43% of the country supports Trump. But I’d like to find out, because we have to include everyone in our path forward. If our best ideas are to stop talking to or fire anyone who disagrees with us, we’ll be facing this whole situation again in 2020.