The Time the Indy 500 Almost Canceled Donald Trump

On the doorstep of a possible presidential campaign, Donald Trump would set the pace for the rest of the field, a role that is now familiar to him. This time, though, the field wouldn’t be other Republican presidential hopefuls but nearly three dozen IndyCar drivers.

It was April 2011, and the 95th running of the Indy 500, typically held on the Sunday before Memorial Day, was just weeks away. Hailed by those who know the sport as “the greatest spectacle in racing” and begun in 1911, the contest is a 500-mile race at speeds of well over 200 mph around a 2.5-mile oval track that is so big it could theoretically encircle Yankee Stadium, Churchill Downs, the Rose Bowl Stadium, Vatican City and The White House and still have room to spare. It takes place in Speedway, Indiana. (Yes, there is a town of more than 12,000 people here named Speedway because there’s a speedway nearby.)

That year, Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) officials, prompted by Izod, the American clothing company and then-sponsor of the IndyCar race series, had selected Trump to be the pace car driver. Usually a past winner of the race or a celebrity, the pace car driver leads the starting grid of drivers through a ceremonial warm-up lap or two and appears at the 500 Festival Parade earlier in the weekend. Robin Roberts of ABC’s “Good Morning America” and General Colin Powell had recently been pace car drivers. But in 2011, according to former CEO of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Jeff Belskus, Izod wanted Trump, fresh off the 10th season of NBC’s “The Apprentice.”

“[Izod] were the ones that actually helped arrange the opportunity,” Belskus told me. (A representative of Authentic Brands Group Inc, which has since acquired Izod, did not return messages seeking comment.)

Trump agreed, and on April 5, sporting a fuchsia tie, he stood in front of a replica of the official pace car, a gleaming white Chevrolet Camaro that had been rolled into the lobby of Trump Tower. With the press in attendance, Indy 500 officials introduced him as that year’s driver.

Trump was an unconventional choice. For starters, there was the matter of his prowess behind the wheel. He was a Manhattan businessman who spent most of his time ensconced high above the streets in his Fifth Avenue apartment, or being chauffeured around. When he did get behind the wheel, it was one that belonged to a golf cart.

Belskus flanked Trump that day at the press conference in Trump Tower. “A media magnet,” Belskus recalled thinking in an interview with POLITICO. “I remember him getting a lot of attention. He seemed to enjoy it.” But he was also worried about whether Trump could pull off the assignment without a hitch. “He assured us that he had a driver’s license and was capable of doing it,” Belskus said of Trump.

Then there was the matter of Trump’s political ambitions — he was flirting with running against President Barack Obama in 2012 — and his birther comments. In a March 23 appearance on “The View,” Trump had raised the racist conspiracy that then-President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., telling the hosts that “there’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn't like.” Two more times before he was announced as the pace car driver, he would bring up the issue, on Fox News and again on "The Laura Ingraham Show." “Obama’s birth certificate might have ‘Muslim.’ And if you’re a Muslim, you don’t change your religion, by the way,” he said on Ingraham’s show on March 30. It continued even after he landed the Indy 500 honor, with Trump repeating the baseless conspiracy theory on "Morning Joe" and NBC’s “Today” show.

In spite of those incendiary remarks, Trump was set to be zooming around the track in a Chevrolet Camaro in a matter of weeks. “He was looking forward to it,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former consigliere who was advising him and handling negotiations with the Speedway at the time, told me in his first interview on the topic in more than a decade.

That is until Michael Wallack, a local Democratic Indianapolis attorney and a rabid race fan who had attended almost every Indy 500 since 1971, caught wind that Trump would drive the pace car. It didn’t sit right with him. Wallack didn’t like that Trump had no connection to racing. Nor did he like the birther comments. He thought the Indy 500 should be a politics-free event.

“This was the first time a politician had been given the role, somebody who was divisive and controversial,” Wallack told me, after first expressing fear that discussing this with a reporter in 2022 would make him a political target. “[The late Indiana Sen.] Dick Lugar was never picked to drive the pace car. [Former Indiana Sen. and Gov.] Evan Bayh never drove the pace car. Here was this guy from New York, who had recently expressed racist conspiracies, being asked to drive the pace car.”

So, Wallack went to war with the man who would become president. His goal? To keep politics out of the Indy 500.

At its core, the Indy 500 has more or less always been an auto-themed amalgam of Americana and pop culture. “It’s an event that cuts across economic and political divisions,” said Joseph Ball, a longtime Indianapolis race fan and journalist who has covered the race.

“Where Formula One’s glamour and allure attract a playground for the wealthy, the Indy 500 is an elevated reflection of America’s gritty, blue-collar attitude, captivating all walks of life with awe-inspiring sights, sounds and speed,” Ball said. He also noted the diversity of the event: Of the 33 drivers in this year’s race, 20 of them are foreign-born and represent 14 nationalities.

Indeed, it is the largest single-day spectator sporting event globally, drawing in some years more than hundreds of thousands of fans — politicians and politicos among them. Ronald Reagan visited the track in 1976, and drove a pace car around the track (though he was not the official pace car driver that year). President Gerald Ford attended the race in 1979. Bill Clinton paid homage to the track with a post-presidential visit here in 2003. In the lead-up to Indiana’s decisive 2008 May Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton visited the track to take in some practice laps.

One of the 500’s biggest fans is Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who has attended the race roughly 20 times, last in 2019. Last year, as the nation found itself still beset by the pandemic, he recorded a special video message on Twitter hailing the race and thanking frontline health workers for turning the place into a mass vaccination site last spring, where I got my first dose of Moderna. Klain once told me his perfect day back in his hometown of Indianapolis would include a trip to the race. “It’s the greatest spectacle in racing and then some,” he told me this week in an email sent by an aide. “I love the traditions. I love the technology and the courage of the drivers.” (According to the aide, he will not be in attendance this year.)

Klain’s fandom might be rivaled by that of fellow Hoosier and former Vice President Mike Pence, who has been to the race more than 30 times. As sitting vice president, Pence attended the race in 2017, his motorcade holding up traffic. (A Pence aide told me to expect the former veep at the track again this year.)

Despite this high-profile political fan base, the Indy 500 has largely — and surprisingly — avoided becoming a political pawn for either side of the aisle, even as other sports have gotten caught up in political controversies. “That’s our internal desire,” said Doug Boles, Indianapolis Motor Speedway president. “It’s a statewide asset, and it’s an asset for everyone.

Indy 500 officials even avoided any negative blowback from encouraging fans to get vaccinated. “The thing that I saw the most from our vaccination clinic is, I heard a lot from people who are on the fence or who are maybe leaning towards not getting it, that when they had an opportunity to get it at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it was the thing that pushed them over the edge and helps them to get the vaccine,” Boles said. “We really have focused on not getting involved in some of the political conversation.”

When Pence wanted to make a political point while attending a Colts game in October of 2017, he walked out during the national anthem as members of the San Francisco 49ers knelt. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen at the Indy 500. The most political uproar that has ever occurred has been environmental groups protesting a massive balloon launch — consisting of thousands of helium-infused floaters — a practice that the Speedway is ending this year.

If politics is downstream of culture, there is no better place to survey what’s coming in American politics than the Indy 500. And indeed, in 2011, the race became a harbinger of the coming decade of American politics.

First, there was the celebrification of American culture. Traditionally, the role of pace car driver had been entrusted to a figure with some venerable connection to racing (think Bobby Unser, who won three Indy 500s, and drove the pace car in 1989 or 1982). Or, a broadly accepted, patriotic, inspiring personality (think speed-loving Chuck Yeager, the World War II ace who went on to break the sound barrier, and drove the pace car in 1986 and 1988).

But at the beginning of the 21st century, race officials had begun to rotate in the occasional celebrity. There was comedian Jay Leno in 1999, for example, and pre-doping scandal cyclist Lance Armstrong in 2006. “Grey’s Anatomy” star and race car driver Patrick Dempsey took the wheel in 2007. “Good Morning America” anchor Robin Roberts spent years watching the Indianapolis 500 before she drove the pace car in 2010.

The 2011 race also augured some of the next decade’s personalities and conflicts. Pence was at the track, and he had just recently announced he wouldn’t run for president in 2012 but would pursue the governor’s residence instead. Pete Buttigieg, then a candidate for South Bend mayor, attended the race for the first time that year. The two Hoosier foes met that day. “We exchanged some pleasantries, and I didn’t think much of it or expect to see him anytime soon,” Buttigieg wrote in his memoir, Shortest Way Home.

Trump’s looming presence, though, had cast a shadow over the race. After news broke that Trump would drive the pace car, Wallack created a Facebook page calling on the IMS to “Bump Trump.” “I have no problem if Trump dislikes President Obama or his policies,” Wallack wrote on the page. “But to step over the line into the realm of conspiracy-mongering is not good for politics or for America. And it should not be rewarded with the honor of driving the pace car at the Indianapolis 500.”

Within days, the page had garnered more than 17,000 “likes.”

Reporters peppered IMS officials with questions about how they would respond to the controversy Trump had created. “We are certainly aware of the Facebook page, and we have certainly received complaints,” Boles, then the IMS vice president of communications, told reporters. “But we have also received comments from other folks in support of Donald Trump driving the pace car.”

Meanwhile, the Indianapolis Baptist Ministers’ Alliance called on IMS to rescind its invitation to Trump. Organizers of the 500 Festival, which hosts race-adjacent events such as the Indy 500 Festival Parade, weighed whether to have Trump featured in the parade through downtown Indianapolis. “We’ve always traditionally extended this invitation” to the pace car driver, said Megan Bulla, who was in charge of public relations for the parade at the time. “At what point do you kind of step in and say, ‘no,’ because of politics, or ‘no,’ because of people’s stances? It was kind of this uncomfortable, like, well, we’ve never said ‘no’ in the past, so at what point do we draw the line or make a statement?”

Jane Jankowski, spokesperson for then-Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, told reporters that Daniels was in favor of “whatever sells tickets.” Pence, who would stay quiet through most of Trump’s biggest controversies as vice president, doesn’t appear to have made any public comments about Trump at the time.

“You could see and hear and feel how divisive this was even in our town,” recalled Bulla, referencing the blue city’s overall somewhat buttoned-down and conservative bent. “Maybe it was the start of cancel culture.”

The controversy even made it into the pages of POLITICO. Ben Smith, himself a one-time reporter for the Indianapolis Star, published a May 4 item headlined “Indy 500 weighs dumping Trump.” “The reason many of us started to take the notion that Donald Trump would actually run seriously is that he’s begun doing real harm to his brand, which is his main asset,” Smith wrote, with a hat tip to his colleague Maggie Haberman. “No cautious corporation is going to pay for rights to his name if there’s a headache attached.”

In the end, Indianapolis Motor Speedway officials didn’t have to make a tough decision. Trump, who seemed to know which way the wind was blowing, finally bowed out of the event.

“Donald J. Trump today informed the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that he may be announcing shortly his intention to run for the office of President of the United States, and therefore he thought it would be inappropriate to drive the Pace Car for the 100th anniversary running of the Indianapolis 500 on Sunday, May 29,” the IMS said in a statement.

Trump added: “I very much appreciate the honor, but time and business constraints make my appearance there, especially with the necessary practice sessions, impossible to fulfill.”

Cohen, then Trump’s personal fixer, defended Trump in an interview with the Star. “This debate stems from unfounded, incorrect and malicious lies that Donald Trump has a racial bias toward the president,” said Cohen. It was, he told the Star back then, driven by “a very small number of people who are probably not even Indy 500 fans.”

Eleven years later, Cohen told me a different story.

“There was a lot of anger against Trump because of the birther story,” Cohen told me. “I believe that it was Indy who was going to pull the request. So Donald, in typical fashion, wanted to be in control and declare that he was not going to drive the car. To avoid being unwanted, he elected to say he was too busy.” Asked for comment on whether Trump withdrew preemptively, Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich said: “It is embarrassing that POLITICO is relying on a disgraced and disbarred felon, who was convicted of perjury, as a source to peddle Fake News.”

“Indy was fine to let it go that way,” Cohen added. “It was a Cohen catch-and-kill scenario — always protecting the boss.”

The IMS selected A.J. Foyt, a perennial fan-favorite driver and past race winner, in Trump’s place.

“A sigh of relief,” Bulla, the former public relations official for the Indy 500 Festival, recalled. “You want the spotlight to be on Indianapolis in the month of May.”

On Wallack’s “Bump Trump” Facebook page, commenters celebrated. “Trump is out--citing conflicts...LOL! Yeah the conflict was he can’t stand to have his enormous ego poked in any way. Here’s your ‘conflict’--we don’t want you!”

On his radio show, the late conservative firebrand Rush Limbaugh fumed. He directed his ire at Wallack, whom he derided as “some local lawyer who’s a Democrat fundraiser, operative, hack, or what have you,” saying he raised “holy hell about Trump being a divisive figure.”

Today, IMS officials are reluctant to recount the episode, preferring to keep the greatest spectacle in racing from becoming a political one. “None of us really talk about Trump and the pace car,” Alex Damron, IMS’ vice president of corporate communications, told me.

Trump never paid a price with Hoosier votes: He won the state by double-digit margins in 2016 and 2020. And he never seemed to nurse a grudge with the Speedway the way he did with the NFL or NBA even though the Speedway spurned him. In 2019, Trump awarded Roger Penske, a team owner whose outfit has won the Indy 500 a record 18 times, the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. A month later, in November, Penske, himself a former pace car driver, bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Meanwhile, largely because of Wallack’s crusade in 2011, the race has remained one of the last bipartisan bastions in American professional sports.

That has also made Wallack, who is preparing to attend what he estimates is nearly his 50th Indy 500 this weekend, something of a celebrity among his friends.

“I have from time to time joked,” Wallack told me, “that I was one of the only ones who managed to beat Donald Trump.”