Trump’s speech is running an hour behind. After a half-hour wait, restless attendees begin chanting “Trump.” The woman sitting in front of me mumbles her own chant:
“Bitcoin, bitcoin, that's what they should be chanting.” She must have gotten the memo: It's not a Trump rally; it's a Bitcoin rally.
When Trump finally takes the stage for “God Bless the USA,” he basks in the glory of a standing ovation, “excited… to become the first American president ever to address a bitcoin event.” His next move is to galvanize his supporters in the audience. “This is the kind of spirit that will help us make America great again. I stand before you today filled with respect and admiration,” for what he later calls all the “high-IQ individuals” in the room. He reiterates previous promises (releasing Ross on day one; never creating a central bank digital currency) and touts a few new ones (the plan for a U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve, which Senator Lummis outlines in a brief speech after Trump’s; the firing of SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, an arch-foe of the crypto industry). He promises that no one in the industry will have to move to China for work; and says we’ll keep using fossil fuels. We will have so much electricity, he says, “please, please Mr. President… no more electricity, sir, we have enough!”
He lashes out at his political opponents as usual, promising that no one in his administration will “go woke,” a sentiment he perhaps knows will resonate with the bitcoin crowd. But he shows even greater understanding with a basic appeal to the public’s wallets: under his leadership, “bitcoin and crypto will skyrocket like never before.” The crowd goes wild.
As I leave the conference center after the speech, I see a tuft of side-combed orange hair disappear down the escalator. I follow him.
“It was a very orange talk,” says Trump impersonator, Atlanta-based comedian Josh Warren, when I ask how the keynote went, immediately impersonating Trump. “We’ve had people ask who’s more orange, RFK or me, and it’s amazing to me that I’m still the orange guy.”
Warren is not a Bitcoin guy, but his joke was better received here than it was at the Libertarian National Convention in DC. When I ask him about his vote, he says it will be “for comedy.”
“We’re just here to disrupt the status quo. Humanity is destroying comedy,” he says seriously, before falling back on the Trump act, adding that the “deep state doesn’t want you talking about things that make you think anymore.”
In his introduction to Trump's keynote, Bailey had called bitcoin “not a red party thing. It's not a blue party thing. It's an orange party thing.” [referencing the color of the bitcoin logo].” Before he joked that an orange party should be run by an orange man, he had a point. Bitcoin 2024 ticket holders aren’t necessarily people who would define themselves as Trump enthusiasts, though the majority WIRED spoke to apparently plan to vote for him. Moreover, they’re people who have traditionally distrusted government, a view that more mainstream parts of society now share.
“I was born conservative, went to liberalism, and now I’m going back to conservatism, especially because of what I’ve seen in our country recently,” said Andrew Campbell, who came from Texas and sports a bitcoin pin along with his naturally bitcoin-orange hair. “I think we’ve gone too far to the left, and we need to go back a little bit and reorient ourselves.”
