From Believers to Bitcoin: 24 Hours in Trump’s Code-Switching Campaign

When Donald J. Trump tries to win over a crowd that is not inherently his own, the results can be awkward.

In a matter of just 24 hours this weekend, Donald J. Trump traversed two very different worlds, neither one of them his own.

On Friday night, he appeared before religious leaders in West Palm Beach, Fla. The next afternoon, he was in Nashville, yukking it up with thousands of crypto-evangelists at a Bitcoin conference.

The two groups could hardly be less alike, and Mr. Trump — neither a pious man, nor technologically savvy one — made for an unlikely champion at each. And yet, taken together, the two appearances provided a case study in how he code switches — from Christianity to crypto — as he campaigns.

He begs, he blusters, he makes outlandish promises. And his attempts to win over a crowd that is not inherently his own can be acutely awkward.

On Friday, he spoke at the Believers Summit, a religious conference put on by Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group. It was a slickly produced affair befitting the Southern televangelists and hundreds of pastors and ministry heads who turned up for it.

In this setting, martyrdom was the motif, and Mr. Trump leaned into it, hard. (“I took a bullet for democracy,” he said at one point.)

His speech that night toggled between fire-and-brimstone and semi-desperate wheedling for votes. “I don’t know how a Catholic can vote for the Democrats,” he said, “because they’re after the Catholics, almost as much as they’re after me. I would say I top you.” He said that his new likely rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, “doesn’t like Jewish people,” even though her husband is Jewish.

And yet, when he bragged about the accomplishment that probably mattered most to these voters — the Supreme Court appointments that led to the fall of Roe v. Wade and made abortion policy the domain of the states — Mr. Trump’s visit got complicated.

The crowd booed when he said that he supported abortion bans that include exceptions for life of the mother, rape and incest. “I think it’s very important,” he argued, suddenly on defense.

“You do have to win elections,” he said. “If you don’t do certain things, you’re not going to win elections, and it will be a very Pyrrhic victory — it’ll be a victory that’s not really a victory at all.”

Some of the believers planning to vote for Mr. Trump confessed ambivalence. “I don’t think Trump’s perfect, he’s not Jesus, so best not to idolize him,” said John Clark, 26, a graphic designer from Minneapolis. “As much as he represents conservative values, he also doesn’t, in a lot of ways. Like, being, let’s say, hateful in some ways.”

Ben Carson, the housing secretary under Mr. Trump, reminded the crowd that Mr. Trump had come from “the dog eat dog world” of Manhattan real estate. “But it’s OK, because, you know, David was a pretty slimy guy, too, in the Bible — I mean, murder, and adultery, and deceit. And yet, God said he’s a man after my own heart.”

By now, conservative Christians and Mr. Trump have a long-running deal: They overlook certain personal qualities and he delivers on their priorities. Mr. Trump’s speech seemed meant to remind them of their end of the bargain.

He admonished them for not voting in large enough numbers. “I don’t want to scold you,” he said, “but did you know that Christians do not vote proportionately? They don’t vote like they should.”

He promised that if they could please just suck it up and vote for him one last time, he would grant all their wishes, and they’d never have to bother with the ballot box ever again. “You won’t have to do it anymore,” exhorted the former president. “Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

As he wrapped up, he told his beautiful Christians about the next stop on the campaign trail. “Tomorrow, I’m going to be with the Bitcoin people,” he said. “That’s a little different.”

And it was.

The next afternoon, at the Music City Center in Nashville, Mr. Trump got a fresh start. There was a new crowd to which he could promise the world, and not worry about the reality of politics or elections.

“Hello, bitcoiners,” he said to thousands of blockchain bros at the Bitcoin 2024 conference. “This is a great honor.”

He was done with the Jesus talk. Now, he was preaching the gospel of crypto. “There’s never been anything like it,” he said. “Most people have no idea what the hell it is, you know that, right?”

It was an absurd sight: A Luddite who not so long ago instructed one of his aides to follow him around with a portable printer so he could read news off the internet in paper form was now extolling the wonders of Bitcoin, a digital currency he recently described as being “based on thin air.”

This was an atypically apolitical crowd for him. These were not natural Trump supporters. Many could best be described as just dudes, dudes who liked tech. Some said they’d never voted before, but were newly Trump-curious.

“He’s coming here and trying to earn your vote, I respect that,” said Dave Smith, a comedian who spoke before the former president. Mr. Smith pontificated that Mr. Trump might not be all that bad, if you judged him by his enemies — namely, the “entire corporate media” and the intelligence agencies — and the crowd clapped in agreement.

Mr. Trump started with flattery. He told them they were all “high IQ individuals” and tried to relate, somewhat awkwardly, by telling them about an uncle he had who was a professor at M.I.T. “He would have fit in with this room very nicely actually,” Mr. Trump told them.

At one point, he went on a digression about how Bill and Hillary Clinton attended his third wedding, to Melania, and the crowd seemed unsure what to make of this information.

He wove in the usual chum, the dark stuff that plays so well at his rallies: talk of cities in decline, and “left-wing fascists,” and immigrants streaming across the border. But all that American carnage was better received by the believers in Florida. At the Bitcoin event, his grievances hung oddly in the air. At times, he halted for applause that never came. He talked of a stolen election only once, and quickly moved on.

But there were plenty of goodies that had been baked into his teleprompter speech to win over the crowd. Mr. Trump started tossing out promises: He said he would appoint a crypto advisory council (“Would anybody like to be on that council?”) and said he would create a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile.”

He swore he would fire Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission who is the bête noire to all bitcoiners, and the room erupted. Mr. Trump was startled by the reaction.

“Wow, I didn’t know he was that unpopular! Let me say it again.” He repeated the line, and the room began to chant, for the first time, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

At last, he had found a villain and the Bitcoin conference became a Trump rally.

“Oh, you’re going to be very happy with me,” he told the crowd. Mr. Trump said he would make America “the crypto capital of the planet,” and they roared some more.

There were other villains to warn about: He called democrats “totalitarians” who are “hellbent on crushing crypto.” Perhaps anticipating this attack, Vice President Kamala Harris started making overtures last week to crypto companies, apparently signaling that her administration would be more open to the space than the current one, according to reports in The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The former president’s speech was well received by many attendees who streamed out of the auditorium afterward. “I’ve never voted, and I’m not affiliated with any party,” said Sean McCaffrey, 24, who works for a crypto company called TravelSwap and was visiting from Jacksonville, Fla. “He might’ve just won me over.”

Whether bitcoiners and Mr. Trump had entered into a new, durable political bargain remains an open question. Though he spent 50 minutes gushing about his newfound love of cryptocurrencies, there were few signs that he understood the policies he had promised or whether he would be able to execute them. (The Supreme Court has not weighed in on the question of whether a president can actually fire an S.E.C. commissioner without cause.)

When he bid the group farewell, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he still was not of their world: “Have a good time with your Bitcoin and your crypto, and everything else that you’re playing with.”