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    24 horas en la campaña de Trump

    Cuando Donald Trump intenta ganarse a un público que no es inherentemente el suyo, los resultados pueden ser algo incómodos.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El fin de semana pasado, en solo 24 horas, Donald Trump visitó dos mundos muy diferentes al suyo.El viernes por la noche se presentó ante líderes religiosos en West Palm Beach, Florida. La tarde siguiente estuvo en Nashville, charlando con miles de criptoevangelistas en una conferencia sobre bitcóin.Estos grupos no podrían ser más diferentes, y Trump —que ni es devoto ni domina la tecnología— no era el defensor ideal para ninguno de los dos. Y, sin embargo, las dos apariciones proporcionaron un caso práctico para observar cómo él va cambiando de códigos —del cristianismo a las criptomonedas— mientras hace campaña.Suplica, fanfarronea, hace promesas extravagantes. Y sus intentos de ganarse a un público que no es inherentemente el suyo pueden ser muy incómodos.El viernes habló en la Cumbre de los Creyentes, una conferencia religiosa organizada por Charlie Kirk, fundador de Turning Point USA, un grupo activista conservador. Se trataba de un evento de producción impecable, adecuado para los televangelistas sureños y los cientos de pastores y jefes de ministerios que acudieron a la cita.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Agrees to Be Interviewed by F.B.I. in Its Investigation Into Gunman

    The F.B.I. also provided the most comprehensive portrait to date of the shooter, revealing that he carefully concealed more than two dozen online purchases of weapons and explosives using aliases.Former President Donald J. Trump has agreed to be interviewed by the F.B.I. as part of its investigation into the motives of the 20-year-old man who tried to assassinate him during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, bureau officials said on Monday.“We want to get his perspective on what he observed, like any other witness,” Kevin Rojek, the head of the bureau’s Pittsburgh field office, said on a call with reporters. “It is a standard victim interview, like we would do.”Mr. Trump’s supporters had sharply criticized Christopher A. Wray, the bureau’s director, for telling a House committee last week that investigators had not definitively determined the cause of the minor injury to the former president’s ear. By week’s end, the F.B.I. offered its most definitive explanation yet, saying it was a bullet or a fragment of one, a statement it reiterated on Monday.The F.B.I. also provided the most comprehensive portrait to date of the gunman, Thomas Crooks, revealing that he carefully concealed more than two dozen online purchases of weapons and explosives using aliases, and that he gathered information on other assassination attempts, including the shooting of Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, in May.Mr. Rojek also provided information about a critical — and lost — opportunity to stop Mr. Crooks. He said that a local law enforcement officer who was boosted onto the warehouse roof where Mr. Crooks had positioned himself just before the shooting “dropped down” to the ground after the shooter aimed at the officer.About 25 to 30 seconds later, Mr. Crooks fired eight rounds — hitting Mr. Trump’s ear, killing a bystander and injuring two other people.F.B.I. officials said they were taking the unusual step of providing investigative details, even though their efforts were continuing, to combat conspiracy theories and misinformation.They also said that their investigation was not geared toward identifying or analyzing security failures by the Secret Service and local enforcement that allowed Mr. Crooks to get within a few hundred yards of Mr. Trump to discharge a deadly volley with a clear line of sight.The investigation, they said, has been entirely focused on determining whether he was motivated by political animus — they have found no evidence to suggest that so far — and to find out if he was part of a larger conspiracy. They have not ruled that possibility out, but thus far, the bureau has found that Mr. Crooks had few contacts outside of his immediate family, and did not even seem to interact much with co-workers or fellow participants on gaming platforms.“We do still believe that he was a loner,” Mr. Rojek said. More

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    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.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Hulk Hogan Is Not the Only Way to Be a Man

    The Democratic Party must join the battle for the hearts and minds of young men. It matters not just for this election, though the vast and growing gender gap means that disaffected men could hand Donald Trump the presidency. It matters for how we mentor young men, and it matters for how we view masculinity itself.And yes, the Democrats can do it. Within the Kamala Harris coalition, there are men who can show a better way.If you ever wondered whether the Republican Party sees itself as the party of men, I’d invite you to rewatch the last night of the Republican National Convention. Prime time featured a rousing speech by the wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, a song by Kid Rock and a speech by Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship — all as warm-up acts before Trump delivered his acceptance speech. Republican manliness was the capstone of the convention.But what kind of men were featured? They’re all rich and powerful, and as a longtime fan of professional wrestling, I loved watching Hogan as a kid, but none of them are the kind of man I’d want my son to be. White was caught on video slapping his wife. Kid Rock has his own checkered past, including a sex tape and an assault charge related to a fight in a Nashville strip club. Hogan faced his own sex scandal after he had a bizarre sexual relationship with a woman who was married to one of his close friends, a radio host who goes by “Bubba the Love Sponge.”We know all about Trump, but it’s worth remembering some of his worst moments — including a jury finding that he was liable for sexual abuse, his defamation of his sex-abuse victim, the “Access Hollywood” tape and the countless examples of his cruelly insulting the women he so plainly hates.JD Vance is different. No one should denigrate his personal story. He has overcome great adversity, served his country honorably as a Marine and, by all accounts, is a good husband and father. But he now wears Trumpist masculinity like an ill-fitting suit. Last week, he was justifiably attacked for a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson in which he declared that the country is run, “via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies.” He identified Harris (who has two stepchildren) as just the kind of person he was talking about.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump, Appealing to Bitcoin Fans, Vows U.S. Will Be ‘Crypto Capital of the Planet’

    Former President Donald J. Trump vowed on Saturday that he would turn the United States into a “Bitcoin superpower” if returned to the White House, wielding much of the same rhetoric of persecution that he has applied to himself and his supporters to appeal to cryptocurrency enthusiasts who want to see less regulation.“Sadly, we see the attacks on crypto,” Mr. Trump told a gathering of cryptocurrency fans in Nashville. “It’s a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power. They’ve done it to me.”He added that, if he were elected, “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over” and that “the moment I’m sworn in, the persecution stops and the weaponization ends against your industry.”Mr. Trump has been competing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, for the support of cryptocurrency holders, and his remarks represented one of his most direct pitches yet.Three large crypto firms have invested about $150 million to elect pro-crypto candidates in congressional races. In his speech, Mr. Trump promoted himself as “the first major party nominee in American history to accept donations in Bitcoin and crypto,” adding that his campaign has raised $25 million from cryptocurrency donations in the last two months.The former president offered promises of sweeping deregulation and the establishment of a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    JD Vance Stumbles in His Debut as Democrats Go on Offense

    In the 12 days since Ohio’s junior senator was tapped as the future of Donald J. Trump’s movement, old comments and a chorus of derision have blunted any sense of invulnerability.The choice of Senator JD Vance as former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate reflected the confidence of a campaign so sure of victory in November that it could look beyond a second Trump term to the legacy of his movement.But in less than two weeks, Mr. Vance has found himself on the defensive, and his struggles have dented the sense of invulnerability that only a week ago seemed to be the overriding image of the Trump campaign.A stream of years-old quotes, videos and audio comments unearthed by Democrats and the news media in recent days has threatened to undermine the Trump campaign’s outreach to women, voters of color and the very blue-collar voters to whom Mr. Vance, a first-term Ohio senator, was supposed to appeal.His past comments deriding “childless cat ladies,” supporting a “federal response” to stop abortion in Democratic states and promoting a higher tax burden for childless Americans have yielded a chorus of criticism from Democrats. Mr. Vance’s fresh efforts to explain them have provided Democrats more material, with the Harris campaign promoting one short clip in which he seems to suggest that when he spoke of childless cat ladies, he meant no insult to cats — “I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said.And his first handful of appearances on the stump have drawn unflattering attention. During an appearance in his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, he tried to explain how his critics would call his drinking Diet Mountain Dew racist, with an awkward aside assuring the audience that Diet Mountain Dew was good.Mr. Vance’s stumbles have come after a remarkable two weeks when Mr. Trump survived an assassination attempt, and then rallied the party — and even some skeptics — behind him. The Republican National Convention began with calls for national unity, and though those calls were at times undercut by the Republican presidential nominee, the ticket vaulted out of Milwaukee with a head of steam and an expanded lead in the polls.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Minnesota’s Governor, a Harris V.P. Contender, Calls Trump and Vance ‘Weird People’

    In a potential audition to be Kamala Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Saturday cast former President Donald J. Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, as a dangerous combination before their campaign visit to the state later in the day.“The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people,” Mr. Walz said during an event organized by the Harris campaign. “We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”Speaking to a crowd of about 200 people packed into the Saint Paul Labor Center, an energetic Mr. Walz mocked Mr. Trump’s selection of Mr. Vance as his running mate.“They went out, you know — because he’s a TV guy — they go out and try to do this central casting: ‘Oh, we’ll get this guy who wrote a book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” you know,’” he said, referring to Mr. Vance’s best-selling memoir, “because all my hillbilly relatives went to Yale and became, you know, venture capitalists.”The rally, which also featured Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Betty McCollum, both Democrats of Minnesota, took place just hours before Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance were scheduled to headline their own rally in St. Cloud, a city of about 70,000 that narrowly went for Mr. Trump in 2016 but that President Biden won by a comfortable margin in 2020.“The nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota: These guys are just weird,” Mr. Walz said of the Republican ticket, echoing a message he debuted on MSNBC this week and that the Harris campaign itself has begun to test drive.Polling before Mr. Biden’s exit from the race six days ago had given Republican organizers hope that Minnesota, which has not supported a Republican nominee since Richard Nixon in 1972, could be in play in November. Mr. Walz and the other speakers sought to tamp down that notion on Saturday by focusing on two polls released on Friday that showed Ms. Harris leading Mr. Trump in the state.“He’s here today, in the state of hockey, to complete his trifecta,” Mr. Walz said of Mr. Trump. “He lost in ’16. He lost in ’20. He loses in ’24.”Asked about a report from Bloomberg News suggesting that he was among three finalists being considered to be Ms. Harris’s running mate, Mr. Walz told reporters that he was “honored to be in this conversation” and that he was excited by the energy that Ms. Harris’s choice was bringing to the Democratic Party.“I love them all,” he said of the other vice-presidential contenders. “But this is the vice president’s pick. And I tell you what, I trust her judgment.” More

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    Harris Holds First Fund-Raiser as Democrats Rally: ‘We Are the Underdogs’

    Vice President Kamala Harris warned a crowd of supporters on Saturday that former President Donald J. Trump held the advantage in their contest for the White House given the short window until Election Day.“We got a fight ahead of us, and we are the underdogs in this race, OK?” Ms. Harris said in Pittsfield, Mass., at her first fund-raiser since President Biden dropped his re-election bid six days ago. “Level set, we’re the underdogs in this race. But this is a people-powered campaign, and we have momentum.”Polls have shown the vice president catching up to Mr. Trump — welcome news for Democrats after Mr. Biden had fallen significantly behind. The Harris campaign has also shown new strength in fund-raising and in the number of new volunteers, with the election roughly three months away.Since announcing her candidacy for the Democratic nomination and receiving Mr. Biden’s endorsement, Ms. Harris has deployed a sharpened message against Mr. Trump. On Saturday, she suggested he would restrict Americans’ “most fundamental rights,” including reproductive freedoms, and called him a “bully.”“What other freedoms could be on the table for the taking?” she said during her remarks, repeating her stark warnings of the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. “It’s serious business.”She also leaned into a new Democratic attack on the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, saying that some of the swipes the men had taken against her were “just plain weird.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More