A president who cannot fill a state fair now stages a MAGA-vetted children’s competition on ESPN — while Iran burns, power bills spike, and the grocery aisle turns into a household emergency. The Patriot Games are not a scandal because they are trivial. They are a scandal because they are what he chose to focus on.
Over the weekend in Geneva, Ohio, a small town of fewer than six thousand people, President Donald Trump watched two teenagers claim $125,000 apiece for winning a competition his administration built from scratch, aired on the ESPN app to a virtually invisible audience, and stocked with contestants selected — by CNN’s own review of application videos — for their fluency in MAGA rhetoric and their attendance at private Christian schools. It was called the Patriot Games. In practice it was closer to casting.
The premise was superficially wholesome: one boy and one girl from every state and territory, ages 14 to 17, brought together at SPIRE Academy to compete in what Front Office Sports described as “a mix of military-style endurance circuits and playground sports, like kickball and dodgeball.” The event was organized by Freedom 250, the Trump-created entity running the administration’s 250th-birthday celebrations. ESPN’s top talent — Laura Rutledge, Matt Barrie, Beth Mowins, Tom Hart, Jordan Rodgers — anchored coverage. An hour-long primetime special aired on ABC. Trump flew in for the finale, sat courtside, and did a live interview with Rutledge in which he told her the games had been “as exciting as anything.”
What Trump did not mention on air is that his patriotic showcase was rigged in ways both ideological and geographical, that the network putting it on air is currently laying off correspondents while its chairman flies to Ohio to be photographed with the president, and that the country he was ostensibly celebrating is presently at war without congressional authorization, watching electricity prices explode, and staring down what economists across the political spectrum now openly describe as an affordability crisis.
The Patriot Games are not important because a sports competition was mishandled. They are important because of what a president chooses to do with his time, his podium, his networks, and his country’s attention.
I. The MAGA Casting Call
CNN senior enterprise reporter Isabelle Khurshudyan and her colleagues reviewed the pool of contestants featured on Freedom 250’s Instagram and found a portrait almost too tidy to be accidental: overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly homeschooled or enrolled in private Christian schools, with a striking concentration of children of active-duty military and JROTC participants. Contestants were selected through video applications in which they were asked why they wanted to compete and how sports had shaped them. Many, CNN found, used the space to thank Trump personally and to declare their Christian faith.
This was not a talent search that happened to attract a particular demographic. It was a pipeline: military bases, homeschool co-ops, Christian school networks, and MAGA-adjacent influencer accounts. Two contestants — one from Ohio, one from Oregon — told CNN they had heard about the event through an Instagram traditional-values influencer. At least one North Carolina teenager disclosed that he had founded a chapter of Club America, the high school arm of Turning Point USA.
The geography was even harder to defend. The Daily Beast, citing CNN’s reporting, noted that the male teenager representing Puerto Rico is from Texas. Sixteen-year-old Bobbi Vickers, representing Massachusetts, attends school in California. The girl chosen to represent Maine, The Advocate reported, does not live in Maine either — her application video reportedly celebrated her school’s refusal to play a team with a transgender athlete, an incident traced not to Maine but to a Christian school in Vermont, another state where she does not reside.
“I get a bunch of questions like, why are you representing Massachusetts and not your home state?”
— Bobbi Vickers, 16, “Massachusetts” contestant, to CNN
When the “national” competition cannot even convince its own contestants that they belong on the roster they were assigned, the exercise has stopped being sport. It has become branding.
II. A Program Its Own Contestants Didn’t Understand
The rigging is only half the indictment. The other half is the sheer incompetence of the operation. Reporting compiled by Yahoo Sports and other outlets makes clear the contestants themselves were operating in the dark. The only event confirmed to them before arrival was the 100-meter dash. “I’m not 100 percent sure what’s going to be happening. I’m definitely training all around, just to prepare,” 16-year-old Floridian Max Biondolillo told The Washington Times. Others told CNN they were unsure how team events like dodgeball and kickball would even be scored.
Attendance was thin. Freedom 250 scrambled to fill seats in the run-up to Trump’s arrival, echoing the sparse-crowd embarrassment of the earlier Great American State Fair on the National Mall. As The Nation reported, that fair suffered lackluster attendance, weather cancellations, early closures, and the loss of most of its planned musical acts, who backed out en masse over the event’s political tilt. Freedom 250 has now asked Congress for an additional $10 million to reimburse the National Park Service — on top of the $150 million already appropriated for the semiquincentennial through the One Big Beautiful Bill. Sen. Jeff Merkley called the request “unacceptable.”
CNN reviewed application videos and found contestants “were not chosen solely for their athletic ability, but also for their love of MAGA,” with heavy overrepresentation of Christian-school and homeschool students.
Massachusetts’s contestant attends school in California. Puerto Rico’s male entrant is from Texas. Maine’s chosen girl reportedly lives in New Hampshire and attends school in Vermont.
At least one contestant is a member of Club America, the Turning Point USA high school arm. Many contestants thanked Trump personally in their audition videos.
Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro attended the finale alongside Trump — weeks after ESPN eliminated eight high-profile on-air positions in a July restructuring.
III. A Network Paying Court
Perhaps the most revealing detail of the entire weekend came not from the competitors but from the audience. As Awful Announcing documented, ESPN gave the Patriot Games minimal promotion — the network did not appear to think its viewers particularly wanted to watch teenagers play dodgeball at a presidential vanity event. And yet ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro and Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro nonetheless flew to Geneva, Ohio, to sit beside the president. Pat McAfee, whose flagship ESPN show has aggressively marketed its “no politics” posture, met Trump on a rainy tarmac and grinned through selfies.
This is what regulatory pressure looks like when it works. Disney has already settled a defamation suit with Trump after ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos mischaracterized past court findings against him. Now the corporate parent’s top executives fly across the country to appear in family photographs with a president whose administration holds sweeping merger-review, licensing, and regulatory authority over their business. The Patriot Games were, functionally, a compliance exercise.
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IV. What He Was Not Doing
It matters what a president devotes his weekend to, because a president has only so many weekends. While Trump was in Geneva congratulating teenagers, several actual national emergencies remained conspicuously unaddressed.
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This is not a president confronting the problems of the country he leads. This is a president running an amusement park. The Patriot Games, the UFC cage match on the White House lawn, the record-attempt fireworks display, the sparsely attended state fair, the demand for a triumphal arch near Arlington — all of it forms a single, coherent picture, and none of it addresses a single line item on the average American family’s monthly budget.
“The American people have been clear they don’t want another war in the Middle East — they want healthcare, affordable housing, and care for our communities.”
— Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), Feb. 28, 2026
V. The Question of Priorities Is a Question of Fitness
Political critics of every administration accuse presidents of wasting time on the wrong things. That is not what this is. The pattern here — vanity spectacle organized by a captive foundation, funded by taxpayers and access-selling donors, staged for a captive network, populated by ideologically vetted children — is a pattern about what the president can and cannot sustain attention on. Grocery prices do not applaud. Grid capacity auctions do not stage well on ESPN. The Strait of Hormuz does not send in an audition video praising him. So he does what performs, and he lets the rest drift.
This is where the political conversation begins to shade into a constitutional one, because the country has a mechanism for a president who cannot, or will not, discharge the duties of the office.
The mechanism was written for exactly this question of capacity.
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, allows the Vice President — together with a majority of the Cabinet or “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — to declare that the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Congress has never actually created the “such other body” the amendment authorizes. That is what Rep. Jamie Raskin’s Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity Act (H.R. 1987) would fix.
Raskin introduced the bill in April after publicly demanding that White House physician Capt. Sean Barbabella conduct a comprehensive cognitive and neurological evaluation of the President, in response to what Raskin called “increasingly volatile, incoherent, and alarming public statements” — including Trump’s profane social-media outbursts and threats to “extinguish” a civilization during the ongoing Iran conflict. The bill has since drawn at least fifty House cosponsors, including Reps. Judy Chu, Yvette Clarke, André Carson, Joaquin Castro, and Don Beyer.
The Patriot Games alone are not a 25th Amendment case. A rigged youth sports competition is a scandal, not a medical incapacity, and any honest reading of the amendment has to acknowledge that. But Section 4 does not require a single triggering event. It asks a broader, structural question — whether the President can discharge the duties of the office — and that question is answered by patterns, not incidents. The pattern here is a president who initiates an unauthorized war and then loses the thread of it in profane late-night posts; who watches wholesale electricity prices leap 76% and offers dodgeball; who is told the country cannot afford groceries and answers with fireworks. Those are not partisan complaints. They are the operating definition of “unable to discharge.”
VI. What the Winners Cannot Fix
Two teenagers won the Patriot Games. Kennadi Fuhrman of Kansas took the female title. Rockwell Myers of Utah took the male. Each received $125,000 in scholarship money. They are, by every account, capable young athletes, and none of the above is any indictment of them. Children invited to a national platform should be welcomed to it.
But no child should have to represent a state they don’t live in. No sports network should have to lay off its journalists in July and send its chairman to a president’s pep rally in August. No public fund should be quietly asked to reimburse a taxpayer-funded party that already had $150 million and still ran out. And no president should be greeted, week after week, by the mounting evidence of a country in real distress and answer with a highlight reel.
Editorial Conclusion
The Patriot Games were never really about sport, and the scandal is not that the games were rigged — a rigged game is unsurprising when a captive foundation runs the casting. The scandal is what the games are a substitute for. A country cannot pay its power bill with a primetime special. A war does not end because the commander-in-chief prefers pageantry. Congress should pass the Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity Act, not because a single event triggers it, but because the Constitution anticipated a moment exactly like this one — a presidency that stages the country instead of governing it — and left us the tool. Use it.
Sources & References
- CNN Politics — Trump’s Patriot Games are billed as a youth sports contest. They’re also a test of patriotic branding
- Front Office Sports — Trump to Attend Final Day of Patriot Games, Airing on ESPN App
- The Daily Beast — Trump’s Patriot Games Athletes Spill Embarrassing Details
- The Advocate — Trump’s Patriot Games chose a New Hampshire girl to represent Maine after anti-trans audition video
- Awful Announcing — Despite minimal promotion by ESPN, Jimmy Pitaro and Josh D’Amaro joined Trump at Patriot Games
- The Hill — Trump attends Patriot Games, watches winners be crowned
- Yahoo News — Trump Scrambles to Fill Empty Seats at Latest Vanity Event
- Yahoo Sports — Trump’s Patriot Games Athletes Spill Embarrassing Details (Yahoo Sports)
- Rep. Jamie Raskin — Legislation Establishing Independent Commission on Presidential Capacity (H.R. 1987)
- Rep. Jamie Raskin — Raskin’s 25th Amendment Bill Gains Momentum, Garners 50 Cosponsors
- House Judiciary Dems — Raskin Demands White House Physician Evaluate Trump’s Cognitive Fitness
- Axios — Raskin demands Trump cognitive test in 25th Amendment push
- NBC News — Trump says he doesn’t need congressional authorization for Iran operations
- Al Jazeera — US Senate approves Iran war powers resolution: What that means for Trump
- House Democratic Leader — Leader Jeffries Statement on Trump Administration Strikes on Iran
- Rep. Melanie Stansbury — Stansbury Demands Immediate Congressional Action on Iran Strikes
- Bloomberg — Data Centers Push Power Bills Up 76% on Largest US Grid, Report Shows
- Urban Institute — The American Affordability Tracker
- Consumer Reports — Inside the Energy Affordability Crisis
- The Nation — The Great American State Fair’s Great Belly Flop
- Mandatory — Trump Administration Freedom 250: Congress Asked for $10M More
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