Donald Trump’s appearance at this year’s Daytona 500 was not subtle.
Named the race’s grand marshal, the president buzzed the speedway from aboard Air Force One, dangling the world’s most advanced airliner above 150,000 Nascar fans the way a parent humors an infant with a spoonful of baby food. Later, from the backseat of the presidential limousine, AKA The Beast, he paced the 41-car field around the oval track before the race. The sight of that 20,000lb machine sticking to the track’s banked lanes at 70 mph blew away the crowd all over again. “This is your favorite president,” he told the drivers via their in-car radio system. “I’m a really big fan of you people. You’re talented people and great people and great Americans.” The shock and awe spectacle couldn’t have been more fitting of a man who has been taking the country for a ride since he entered public life more than 50 years ago.
Plenty of other US presidents have used sports to further their agendas. Football wouldn’t be America’s game without rabid sportsman Teddy Roosevelt stepping in to save it from certain abolition at the turn of the 20th century. Former Texas Rangers owner George W Bush put American resilience on display after 9/11 with his on-the-money first pitch to kick off Game 3 of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium. For nine straight years Barack Obama – a basketball superfan – made a spring rite of picking his March Madness bracket live on ESPN, turning those Baracketology sessions into the hoops equivalent of FDR’s fireside chats.
While there’s no doubt that Trump is a genuine fan of some sports in the abstract, he doesn’t care as much about what sports can do for his country as he does what sports can do for him. Given his native New Yorker bona fides, you’d think he’d have staked out firm positions on the sports rivalries that dominate the city. But Trump’s only loyalty is to whoever’s running up front. After the Yankees won back-to-back World Series in the late 70s, Trump and team owner George Steinbrenner, baseball’s eternal autocrat, were inseparable. (Trump called “the Boss” his best friend.) When the Knicks became trendy in the 90s, Trump was courtside at Madison Square Garden between his future second wife Marla Maples and actor Elliott Gould. Trump made himself a fixture at the US Open for nearly four decades, less for the tennis than to be seen mingling with New York’s glitterati and Hollywood celebrities.
The essence of fandom lies in the inevitable struggles in the path to glory. But Trump doesn’t do struggle or even concede defeat; that’s for the plebes, Jets and Mets junkies. He doesn’t indulge in true sports fandom. He engages, in the cold, tech bro-y sense of the word – for the branding opportunity. He leaves the Super Bowl before the end of the game and bails on the Daytona 500 after 11 laps – 189 short of the full distance. His only struggle is with the concept of fair-weather fandom. He’s all about the sure thing. The attitude is about par for a golfer whose reputation as a shameless cheat puts him in league with Kim Jong-il and other cult of personality authoritarians.
Trump prefers nothing more than a “winner”. It’s why he touted quarterback Patrick Mahomes during the Kansas City Chiefs’ three-peat run, and NFL owner Bob Kraft when his New England Patriots were the league’s reigning dynasty; he praised Serena Williams in similar terms when she was at her most dominant on court. But you would be hard pressed to use the same word to describe Trump back when he was pursuing his own sports endeavors, before hopping on the politics bandwagon.
In the 1980s and 90s Trump lured Mike Tyson and other heavyweights to his Atlantic City casino in a failed attempt to upstage the Las Vegas scene. His casinos ultimately went bankrupt, and Atlantic City fell into economic ruin. In 1983 he bought a franchise in the upstart United States Football League expressly to force a merger with the NFL only to wind up collapsing the younger league. In 2014, Trump came up a half-a-billion dollars short of buying the NFL’s Buffalo Bills. He has said that if he owned the team, he likely never would have run for president. You can drive yourself mad thinking of the pain and distress a crowdfunding campaign might have spared the world.
But Trump’s loser history was mostly forgotten once he achieved power and began flexing it. And his strongman image has only benefited from his associations with self-proclaimed tough guys like UFC president Dana White, YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul and former NFL star Herschel Walker – whom Trump recently appointed ambassador to the Bahamas. The past two months have seen Trump steal focus from the college football championship and the Super Bowl, which he mostly used as an excuse to troll Taylor Swift.
The more he makes sports his bully pulpit, the more the actual protagonists in the arena feel compelled to kiss the ring. Ten months ago McLaren F1 boss Zak Brown was the one falling over himself while guiding then-candidate Trump on a VIP tour of the Miami Grand Prix. Earlier this month PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan implored Trump to moderate the merger negotiations between his circuit and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf, which would enrich the family business. “One doesn’t know if he is acting as president of the United States or simply as a businessman, in trying to promote this merger,” US representative Jamie Raskin told the Washington Post, nodding at the millions Trump has collected from both organizations through his golf properties.
Most recently, Team USA general manager Bill Guerin beseeched the president to attend the NHL’s 4 Nations final between the US and Canada amid rising tension between the countries over trade tariffs. “We have a room full of proud American players and coaches and staff,” Guerin told Fox News. “And listen, we’re just trying to represent our country the best way we can.”
But there’s good reason why Team USA ultimately had to settle for a phone call from the president whereas the Daytona 500 crowd got the full presidential parade: Nascar is a more influential crowd for Republican presidents. In 1984 Ronald Reagan became the first of four sitting presidents to attend the Great American Race, and every one since has been a Republican. George W Bush, who attended 12 years after his father, owes his two terms in office in large part to Nascar Dads trooping out to the polls. In 2006 vice-president Dick Cheney did a flyover in Air Force Two before taking a lap around the track in his motorcade, setting the template for Trump’s grand entrance this year.
At the last Daytona 500 I covered in 2017, weeks after Trump was sworn in for his first term, Trump-Pence campaign signs, bumper stickers and flags proliferated in the Daytona infield. Three years later he turned up for his first stint as race grand marshal. That’s a lot of attention by proximity for a sports league that’s fallen in popularity from its Bush-era peak. But you wonder if everyone inside Nascar corporate is totally comfortable with it.
Nascar, after all, has spent the better part of the past 30 years trying to convince the public that it is a diverse, equitable and inclusive sport in spite of its homogeneous presentation and good ol’ boy heritage in the deep south. When Bubba Wallace, Nascar’s only Black Cup series driver, called on the sport’s governing body to ban displays of the confederate flag, he was inundated with abuse and death threats. But since Nascar acquiesced to his demand in 2020, over Trump’s forceful objections, the sport has kept pushing toward progress.
Michael Jordan and Pitbull have joined Nascar as team owners. Kyle Larson, the sport’s only driver of Asian descent, cruised to the 2021 Cup championship in what was a victory for Drive for Diversity – the quarter-century old Nascar program tasked with bringing more women and minorities into the sport. (Never mind if Larson hadn’t exactly helped racial progress by getting suspended for most of the 2020 season after using the N-word on a live stream.) It’s not hard to imagine Trump taking aim at Drive for Diversity if he detects the slightest hint of disloyalty from Nascar. With Trump literally leading the bandwagon, what else can Nascar do but follow dutifully behind?
But playing ball with Trump comes at a cost, especially now that he’s the president again – even if the leagues themselves don’t pick up the tab. The Super Bowl trip to New Orleans is estimated to have set taxpayers back at least $1m. His Daytona 500 drop-in could cost 10 times as much. Some X users, doing the quick math on Air Force One’s hourly operation rate, reckon that $25,000 alone was burned on jet fuel when Air Force One buzzed the speedway. Between the lavish engagements at sporting events and the millions he pocketed from playing golf at his own courses, it’s a wonder anyone believes him when he talks about cracking down on government waste and fraud.
Authenticity has always been a prime selling point of sports, but that’s not why Trump’s in the game. For him, sports are just another venue for his singular brand of ego stroking. Wherever the lights are brightest, you can bet Trump will find some way to make a spectacle of himself.
