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At Trump’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix, Two Americas Collide. Or Do They?
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. In Oliver Stone’s harrowing, semi-autobiographical masterpiece Platoon , which turns 40 this year, a sadistic soldier called Bunny ranks life’s pleasures while chugging a can of beer and listening to Merle Haggard. “Ain’t nothing like a piece of p****, except maybe the Indy 500,” he says.
Stone knew what the line was doing. In 1986, he could drop those three last words into a script and know the audience could instantly locate the American culture in which he was placing Bunny, soon to be a war criminal: cars, country music, beer, bravado and chauvinism.
Now, almost nothing American is allowed to remain merely cultural. From 1:10 p.m. today, 25 IndyCars will run 147 laps around the National Mall , in the bluest city in the country, in a race created by President Donald Trump. The mainstream interpretation has crossed the finish line before the cars: it's Bunny’s red-state pastime, deliberately dropped by MAGA presidential decree into the capital of the other side.
Forget the race itself for now, because that culture clash actually seems one of the most promising things about it. Now, at least, the redneck swaggering across the infield and the coastal elite cycling over the crosswalk will share the same track.
That’s true as far as it goes, except that both those descriptions are false. And the way they are false hints at where American political conversation has taken such a screeching wrong turn.
Trump’s history with IndyCar racing goes back years. The last time he was supposed to take center stage at Indy was in 2011, when he was still a reality show host with a deepening grudge about a birth certificate.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway invited him to drive the pace car at the 100th running of the 500. Fans revolted and an Indianapolis lawyer, Michael Wallack, started a “Bump Trump” campaign that collected 17,000 signatures.
Wallack’s objection, unlike many of those fans, was not chiefly that Trump was a birther. It was that he had no connection to Indianapolis, the 500 or cars. “It just didn’t feel right,” he said.
Trump withdrew, citing his schedule amid a potential presidential bid, and four-time Indy 500 winner A.J. Foyt took the wheel instead. Fifteen years later, Trump is president, and he no longer needs an invitation.
The institutional and business relationship has changed too. Race-team owner Roger Penske received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump in 2019, bought IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2020, and endorsed Trump’s re-election that year. When the Freedom 250 Grand Prix was announced, Penske sent Trump a letter that said, “I am proud to support you and your administration.”
Penske is not the only mogul running this playbook. Two months earlier, Trump’s friend Dana White staged his own version on the South Lawn of the White House: UFC Freedom 250 , a mixed martial arts card built around Trump’s 80th birthday as well as the country’s 250th anniversary. White has been close with Trump for 25 years and introduced him at two Republican conventions.
Two of the most powerful men in American sport chose to stage spectacles as a presidential tribute, both under the “Freedom 250” branding. That might tell you a lot about Penske and White, but it tells you nothing about the people who buy the tickets.
The race was unveiled with the somewhat confusing slogan “Freedom doesn’t ring, it revs.” IndyCar’s own marketing department has not exactly resisted the mood. In May, its store briefly sold a $50 Freedom 250 T-shirt showing Abraham Lincoln in a racing helmet at his own memorial, ONE NATION above him, ONE RACE below. It was taken down within hours in response to “customer feedback.”
The generous explanation is that nobody behind the T-shirt realized why this might offend, because they were in a motor sport bubble. But that isn’t the only bubble.
Another form of motor sport—NASCAR—is the most extreme illustration of the issue. If cultural cartographers had to color one sport red, NASCAR would surely be it: Republican, aging, male, resolutely unmetropolitan.
In fact, the most recent YouGov profile found 26 percent of NASCAR fans were 18 to 29, compared with 20 percent of the country as a whole. Women made up 41 percent of the audience and 44 percent of fans lived in cities, against 37 percent of Americans generally. All these figures are in line with or exceed other major U.S. sports. The stereotype has outlived the people it supposedly describes.
What about political preference? There’s more truth there, but not much. A June 2026 Reuters/Ipsos survey found one in four Republicans called themselves motor-racing fans, compared with one in seven Democrats. A difference, yes, but hardly a Gulf of America. A Reagan Foundation survey this spring found 24 percent of Americans watch NASCAR at least occasionally. That is not a fringe pursuit, even though much of the media treats it like one.
The imbalance shows up clearly against sports NASCAR actually outdraws. Major League Soccer broadcasts on Apple TV, its exclusive U.S. home, and averaged 120,000 viewers per match in 2025, and it gets discussed on mainstream sports television nightly. NASCAR, despite drawing a 14 percent smaller television audience in 2025 than the year before, still averaged 2.48 million viewers per race.
Motor racing can also be, oddly, one of the more democratic afternoons out. The average NFL ticket last season ran about $312 . General admission at the Indianapolis 500 is $50 to $60, with children under 15 free alongside a paying adult. Today’s race costs nothing at all: tickets were distributed by public lottery, 288,000 people applied, and organizers expect roughly 140,000 people a day. For a weekend created by a president and staged by a billionaire-owned series, it’s remarkably egalitarian. It might ev...
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