DAYTONA INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY — The crowd cheered, the cars roared, and President Donald Trump again basked in the pomp and pageantry of one of America’s premier sporting events.
Last weekend, he was at the Super Bowl in New Orleans, relishing the attention at the nation’s most-watched TV event. This Sunday, Trump left his Mar-a-Lago home for a quick trip to the Daytona 500, where he shook hands with drivers before NASCAR’s signature race and reveled in applause as fighter jets screamed overhead and some attendees chanted his name.
“Four-seven, baby!” a man in the crowd yelled as the 47th president exited his limousine.
“I think it’s fantastic. It’s great for the country,” Trump told Fox Sports in a brief interview, explaining why he’d returned to the Daytona 500 on the fifth anniversary of his first visit. He also praised the NASCAR drivers for their skill and speed. “They have a lot of guts.”
The race was quickly delayed by rain, with drivers pausing only 11 laps into the 200-lap event, and Trump left before it could resume. But his brief visit up the Florida coastline was the latest celebration for a politician whose second presidency has been received, so far, more favorably than his first.
“This is your favorite president,” Trump told the drivers by radio, as the presidential limousine, “The Beast,” circled the track. “I’m a big fan. I am a really big fan of you people.”
NASCAR is Trump country, White House officials have said, and Daytona’s famous race is at the heart of it. Volusia County, where the speedway is, voted for Trump over Kamala Harris by a 22-point margin in November. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll in 2023 found that 42 percent of Republicans said they were fans of auto racing, compared with 25 percent of Democrats — the most significant margin among the nine sports included in the poll.
Many people at Sunday’s race had pro-Trump signs, shirts and other paraphernalia, and they whooped in joy as Air Force One flew overhead; several RVs parked in the speedway’s infield flew Trump and American flags side by side.
Trump’s tour of Daytona’s track also doubled as a kind of victory lap. His polling is at an all-time high, as the White House noted Friday, and his Cabinet has been almost entirely confirmed. Many Americans are shrugging over Trump’s actions, a sentiment echoed at this speedway, even as many steps are provoking anger abroad as well as unease and legal challenges at home.
Asked about Trump’s moves to dismantle federal agencies and abruptly fire thousands of federal workers, Jonathan Vilches, a 38-year-old Trump supporter and NASCAR fan, said he sympathized with the affected workers — but only to a point.
“I understand their pain, but understand our pain,” said Vilches, wearing a red Make America Great Again hat and a T-shirt touting driver Joey Logano. Vilches, surrounded by his family as they partied in the speedway’s infield before the race, said he was particularly upset by the Biden administration’s policies to expand protections for transgender people, which he said flouted biblical teachings.
“For the past four years, you’re telling us God was wrong, that God made a mistake with two genders,” Vilches said, praising Trump for reversing President Joe Biden’s policies as well as for returning to Daytona.
Many presidents have been associated with sports. George W. Bush was an owner of a major league baseball team and harbored dreams of being the league’s commissioner, while Barack Obama had a pickup basketball game that sometimes included NBA players.
But the 78-year-old Trump has an especially long relationship with professional teams and athletes.
He sought to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and succeeded in acquiring a team in the rival U.S. Football League more than 40 years ago. He has spent years golfing with legends such as Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus. In his first term, he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on baseball Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera, Woods and other famed athletes. Eleven days after winning the presidency again in November, Trump and his retinue strode into Madison Square Garden in New York for an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, where the crowd hailed him as a conquering hero.
“Trump loves sports in a very specific way — not because of team loyalties, not because of strategies — but for the spectacle of it all, for the proximity to power and the spotlight,” David Niven, a University of Cincinnati political scientist, wrote in an email. He called Trump an “American Caligula,” comparing him to the Roman emperor who reveled in staging fights of gladiators, and said the president draped himself in “cartoon fierceness” in his visits to sporting events.
“Standing aside football players, UFC fighters, race car drivers, he wants their fearlessness to rub off on him,” Niven wrote.
NASCAR has had its moments in Trump’s political story.
Five years ago, the president was also at the Daytona 500 — serving as the race’s grand marshal — as he eyed reelection, but as his advisers were growing increasingly worried about a new disease named covid-19. Analysts have since said that February 2020 ended up being a lost month, with too little preparation for a pandemic that would overwhelm the country a few weeks later and help sweep Trump out of office in November.
The sport also helped fan the flames of his political rebirth. At a NASCAR event in October 2021, a crowd began chanting derisively about then-President Biden — which a reporter paraphrased as “Let’s go, Brandon.” That led to code for a vulgar phrase to mock the Democratic president that was quickly repeated by MAGA supporters. Now, even some three years later, a “Let’s go, Brandon” flag was spotted flying near the Daytona track.
Niven, a former speechwriter for former Ohio governor Ted Strickland (D) and other Democrats, said that Trump picks his spots when visiting sporting events.
“Trump doesn’t go to sports where he’d be called to account,” he wrote. “There are no ‘Trump goes to the NBA championship photo ops’ for a very good reason.”
In Daytona Beach, locals said they understood why Trump was back at their city’s famous race.
“He’s ‘the people’s president,’” said John Nicholson, a 76-year-old retiree who was visiting a library near the speedway, adding that the media had wrongly portrayed Trump. “He’s been treated very badly.”
