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When Donald J. Trump attempts to win over a crowd that is inherently his, the effects can be deceptive.
By Shawn McCreesh
Reporting from Nashville
In just 24 hours this weekend, Donald J. Trump crossed two very different worlds, neither of which were his own.
On Friday night, he appeared before devout leaders in West Palm Beach, Florida. The next afternoon, I was in Nashville, in the company of thousands of crypto evangelists at a Bitcoin conference.
The two teams may be no less similar, and Trump (neither a pious guy nor a techie) was an unlikely champion on each of them. And yet, taken together, the two appearances provided a case study in how he codifies changes, from Christianity to cryptography, in his campaign.
He begs, he boasts, he makes implausible promises. And his attempts to win over a crowd that is inherently his can be incredibly complicated.
On Friday, he spoke at the Believers’ Summit, a devout convention organized through Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group. It was a skillfully executed affair that suited the televangelists of the South and the large number of pastors and ministry leaders who showed up.
In this context, the motive was martyrdom, and Trump relied heavily on it. (“I took a bullet for democracy,” he said at one point. )
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