UPDATE (May 3, 2025, 7:20 p.m. ET): Sovereignty won the 151st Kentucky Derby on Saturday, upsetting favorite Journalism.
Many news programs, including the one I write and produce for, often interview historians, professors and authors who can skillfully draw parallels between the past and the present, to help contextualize a particular moment or experience. In the relentless news cycles of recent years, it is helpful to orient yourself in the cultural discord of the 1960s, the Spanish flu, in Nixon’s calamitous politics — or even in the Kentucky Derby, which celebrates its 151st year on Saturday.
At this year’s Run for the Roses, as the Kentucky Derby is affectionally called, thousands of spectators from across the country will gather on the manicured lawns at Churchill Downs and line up at the betting windows to throw their money behind Journalism, the bay-colored colt favored to win. Or maybe they’ll try their luck on a betting app, praying to the gambling gods for Sandman or Neoequos or another colt or filly with worse odds and a higher payout. Women in custom-ordered wide-brimmed hats and men wearing brightly colored pants will drink from silver mint julep cups and open bottle after bottle of Veuve Clicquot. It will likely get messy in the infield, as it often does. The event has been like this for 151 years, and it will be like this for 151 more, for better or for worse.
It makes perfect sense that Donald Trump sold $75,000 tickets to a ‘MAGA, Again!’ fundraiser event at the derby in 2022.
The Kentucky Derby has always glorified the Good Ole Boys of the American South, a bastion of American conservatism. It makes perfect sense that Donald Trump sold $75,000 tickets to a “MAGA, Again!” fundraiser event at the derby in 2022; it fits perfectly with now-President Trump’s branding and ethos.
It was already like that in 1970, when the Kentucky Derby wasn’t particularly special or notable for any reason except that Hunter S. Thompson was there. Thompson, credited with pioneering the subjective and literary writing style of so-called New Journalism and who is best known for “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” wrote a piece on the Kentucky Derby that year. Published in Scanlan’s Monthly, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” is a salient metaphor for Nixon’s America. It also reads as a parallel between past and present.
The article examined the culture of moral decay Thompson believed Nixon caused to proliferate. Today, the effect is different. The Trump administration has been overt in its desire to rewrite American history and, in turn, American culture. In late March, Trump signed an order that claimed to “restore” American identity and history. Aimed at the Smithsonian Institution, the order argued that “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” And it’s working. Conservative ideology is safer now, with Trump’s lawful protection. In many American spaces it is preferred, even; in classrooms in some states, Trump’s debunked election conspiracy theories may soon be taught, reports say. Politics and the Trump administration were largely absent from the lately very progressive Oscars.
But unlike records of historical figures from Jackie Robinson to Harriet Tubman, the Kentucky Derby, at least by the Trump administration’s standards, needs no rewrite. The outfits, the partying and the pageantry are at odds, and have historically been at odds, with the realities of the event. “The story, as I see it,” wrote Thompson, a Louisville native, “is mainly in the vicious-drunk Southern bourbon horse-s— mentality that surrounds the derby than in the derby itself.”
The Kentucky Derby is notoriously, often prohibitively, expensive. A general admission ticket begins at $366, but if you’re doing the Derby right, you’re not walking around Churchill Downs in general admission; you’re in a box, which starts at $1,765. That’s a steep price when more Americans face economic uncertainty under Trump’s unwieldy tariff plan. The Clubhouse seats hold a significant social cachet. “Along with the politicians, society belle and local captains of commerce, every half-mad dingbat who ever had any pretensions to anything within 500 miles of Louisville will show up there to get strutting drunk and slap a lot of backs and generally make himself obvious,” Thompson wrote in his piece. Gambling, as central to the derby as the horses themselves, is a full-fledged crisis in America, where it increasingly permeates the mainstream sports space especially. According to NBC News, “$210.7 million was wagered on the race last year, up from $188 million the previous year.” It isn’t easy to win big money on a horse either. “The favorite has won the race just under 35% of the time since 1908 (40 times) and not once in the last five years,” per NBC News’ reporting. Toward the end of Thompson’s piece, he describes what it is like in the infield: “Total chaos, no way to see the race, not even the track … nobody cares.” This, too, rings true today. The race is run by 3-year-old thoroughbreds exclusively, young geldings and colts who die gruesome and tortuous deaths all the time. According to PETA, at least 15 horses died in track-related deaths last year, but watchdog website Horseracing Wrongs estimates that number to be nearly 100 a year. Just last week, a Kentucky Derby contender, Valley of Fire, fractured both front legs during morning training and had to be euthanized. In Trump’s second term, culture is already being reworked by those who long for an America that is long past, or maybe never really was. The Kentucky Derby already mythologized this, a story being told well before Trump took office the second time. Hunter S. Thompson saw it in 1970: “the decadent and the depraved.” Then, it was warning of a culture of excess, corruption and moral decay. Today, it’s cultural doctrine.
Hannah Holland
Hannah Holland is a producer for MSNBC's "Velshi" and editor for the "Velshi Banned Book Club." She writes for MSNBC Daily. 
