Trump’s speech is an hour delayed. After a half-hour of waiting, restless attendees begin chanting “Trump.” The woman sitting in front of me mutters her own version of the chant.
“Bitcoin, Bitcoin. That’s what they should be shouting.” She must have gotten the memo. This is not a Trump rally, it’s a Bitcoin rally.
Trump finally took to the stage, chanting “God bless the United States of America,” and basked in the glory of the standing ovation, saying, “I’m thrilled to be the first U.S. president to speak at a Bitcoin event.” His next step is to please his supporters in the audience. “This is the spirit of making America great again. I stand before you today with respect and admiration,” he told what he later called the “high IQ people” in the room. He repeated past promises (freeing Ross on day one, never creating a central bank digital currency) and added some new ones (a U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve plan, detailed in a short speech by Senator Lummis after Trump’s speech, and the firing of SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, the crypto industry’s nemesis). He promised that no one in the industry would have to move to China for work, and that they would continue to use fossil fuels. There is plenty of electricity, so they will say, “Mr. President, please, we don’t need any more electricity, we have enough.”
He belittles his political opponents as usual and promises that no one in the administration will be “woke.” Perhaps he knows this idea resonates with Bitcoin supporters. But he goes even deeper and appeals to his audience’s wallets: Under his leadership, “Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will soar like they’ve never seen them before.” The crowd goes wild.
As I left the conference center after my speech, I saw a man with side-swept orange hair disappear down an escalator, and I followed him.
“That was a very orange speech,” Atlanta-based comedian and Trump impersonator Josh Warren said, quickly imitating Trump, when asked what he thought of the keynote. “We’ve been asking people who’s more orange, RFK or me, and to my surprise, the answer is I’m still the orange man.”
Warren is not a Bitcoin fan, but her approach was more well-received here than at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, D.C. When asked why she voted, she said, “For comedy.”
“We’re here to disrupt the status quo. Humanity is killing comedy,” he said seriously, before returning to his Trump act and adding, “The Deep State doesn’t want us to talk about thought-provoking stuff anymore.”
Bailey began Trump’s keynote by saying that Bitcoin “isn’t a red party thing, it’s not a blue party thing. It’s an orange party thing” (a reference to the colors of Bitcoin’s logo). Before you joke that the Orange Party should be run by an orange guy, he has a point. Bitcoin 2024 ticket buyers are not necessarily Trump supporters, but the majority who spoke to WIRED seem to plan to vote for him. Moreover, they are people who traditionally don’t trust government, a view now shared by the mainstream of society.
“I was born a conservative, I became a liberal, and now I’m coming back to being a conservative, mainly because of what I’ve seen in the country recently,” said Andrew Campbell, who drove in from Texas, wearing a bitcoin pin and naturally orange hair, like the color bitcoin. “I think we’ve gone too far to the left, and we need to bounce back a little bit and get back to the center.”
