Nobody knows more about horse racing than Donald J. Trump, so it’s a little surprising he didn’t tell us who was going to win the Kentucky Derby on Saturday. Maybe he knew and, not wanting to skew the odds, he placed a discreet bet—nobody knows more about discretion than Trump does—and quietly went to the window and collected his winnings. That I could understand. Why he hasn’t crowed about it ever, of course, remains a mystery.
The truly sad thing about Derby Day, though, is that because Trump doesn’t drink, he’s missing most of the fun. Even if he wins, there’s a sense in which he loses. The first Saturday in May, for those of us who love the so-called Sport of Kings, is that wonderful moment when we enjoy the first mint julep of the season. For some of us, it is the only mint julep we’ll have all year. That’s why, as the post parade begins, we gratefully accept our second Mint Julep and maybe, if we are especially fortunate, our third or fourth.
Kentucky claims to have invented this bourbon-based boon to mankind. That’s why they are such a big deal at Churchill Downs and with those of us able only to watch the festivities on TV. Whatever their origins, we approach these concoctions with well-deserved respect.
Mint is a weed of course, almost impossible to eradicate from a garden. But on Derby Day mint takes on the status of a rare and costly hothouse flower. Its leaves are to be muddled, not crushed, and those who don’t know the difference can never regain the reputation they might previously have enjoyed. Brits have always been snooty about American drinking habits—about almost anything American, of course. Americans can be snooty, too, of course, on important matters such as whether to muddle mint leaves or crush them.
As for British condescension, way back in 1849, Francis Trollope of Domestic Manners of the Americans fame made what must have been a painful admission. Yes, the mint julep was another example of our country’s boorishness, she wrote, but “it would, I truly believe, be utterly impossible for the art of man to administer anything so likely to restore them from the overwhelming effects of heat and fatigue” as these mint juleps. (This is something to remember come June, when the Belmont Stakes is run.)
The late Roger Scruton, a philosophe of impeccably conservative credentials, has carried forward the proud British tradition of condescension toward Americans’ boozing habits, with particularly sniffish treatment of bourbon.
Bourbon, Scruton wrote in I Drink, Therefore I Am, is “a refuge for the American soul, to be understood not as a drink but as a ‘shot,’ injected through the mouth into the stomach.” Scruton’s claim that a cocktail, in which bourbon “is stirred with kitsch ingredients,” is a sad response to “the deep loneliness of America,” shows how little he understood, at least on this subject.
To his credit (the horses are now being loaded into the starting gate), Trump has announced that he is removing tariffs to make it easier for Kentucky’s distillers to ship their used bourbon barrels to Scotland. How presidents got the power to do this kind of thing unilaterally requires some explaining, of course, and justification.
The teetotaling President made this commendable move, he said, in time for this year’s Derby and to mark King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s visit. A spokesman for Kentucky distillers called the action “welcome news for our [state’s] signature industry’s efforts to share America’s only native spirit with enthusiasts around the world.” (“And they’re off!”)
It’s too bad for everybody, of course, that the current occupant of the Oval Office doesn’t occasionally partake of Kentucky bourbon himself. There’s the obligatory mint julep on Derby Day, as mentioned, and when autumn returns, there’s nothing quite like an old fashioned to greet the season of “mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
This president could use some mellow fruitfulness, it seems clear. He’s always in a rage about something or someone, and if he chilled out once in a while, nobody could do it better. Nobody. Everyone would tell him, “Sir, no one can chill out better than you can—nobody in the history of this great country, as much of a laughingstock as it has become under previous administrations.”
Oh, yeah—the Derby. Who was it that won, again?
The fact that our elected representatives in Washington are getting older and older—and dying on the job—calls to mind the exchange between a young boy and the legendary jockey Johnny Longden, who was still racing in his late 50s. The boy asked Longden if he was on Noah’s Ark. When Longden said, “Of course not,” the boy asked, “Then how come you weren’t drowned?”
The death in late April of Georgia’s Rep. David Scott is no laughing matter, of course, but a cause of some concern. At 80, Scott, a Democrat, was the fifth member of the 119th Congress to expire while in office. That compares to four during the 118th congressional session, and six during the 117th. Records keep getting toppled. From 2003 to 2013, Sarah Fortinsky reports in The Hill, “each session saw a maximum of one member die, with the 110th Congress a notable outlier at eight.”
The 119th “is one of the oldest on record,” Fortinsky tells us, though this would seem almost obvious to anyone not in a retirement home already. The octogenarian Mitch McConnell’s lapses have been impossible to miss, but the Kentucky senator remains in office. California’s Dianne Feinstein “served until the day she died at 90 in 2023, despite taking a three-month medical hiatus amid mounting concerns about her mental capacities.”
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There’s really only one rational response to all this: Anyone who isn’t concerned about the mental capacities of our elected representatives these days should have his head examined.
Is it too much to ask why leading Democrats aren’t erupting in righteous indignation over attempts to assassinate the president and telling their people to stop it? Isn’t political violence something they say they’re against? They aren’t even ramping up their demands for even stiffer gun control laws. Maybe we should ask the president what is going on here. Nobody knows more about hypocrisy than he does.
