Tonight, ABC will air an hourlong special recap of the Patriot Games, an athletic competition featuring high schoolers from across the country that took place last weekend. The tournament was touted by President Donald Trump as a celebration of American youth and ideals. Instead, it seems the Patriot Games were little more than a celebration of President Donald Trump.
And that’s a shame. This week’s games, far from being a unifying showcase of athletic achievement, displayed a version of America that only partially represents the country. And the athletes participating in this tournament, including those who are openly Trump supporters, deserved more than to be used as political props.
This week’s games, far from being a unifying showcase of athletic achievement, displayed a version of America that only partially represents the country.
Sports don’t belong to one political party or any single group of people. They model healthy behavior in a nation where millions of youths are classified as obese, but they also promote prosocial behavior, cognitive development and better mental health. They teach kids how to work together to achieve a common goal, how to overcome adversity and how to implement notions of sportsmanship and fairness into their day-to-day lives. Sports also have a profound effect on girls as they grow into young women and join the workforce. According to Ernst & Young, 94% of women in the C-suite played a sport at some point, and 74% say that an athletic background can help advance a woman’s career.
These facts seem lost on Trump and the political right, which has long tried to use athletics to promote their political brand. The Patriot Games featured one boy and one girl, age 14 to 17, representing each of the 50 states, U.S. territories, military bases and Indigenous nations.
Held by Freedom 250, the public-private branding and funding arm for the administration’s semiquincentennial celebrations this year, the Patriot Games didn’t just showcase athletic ability, they also served as a de facto MAGA rally, with Trump chants and MAGA hats galore. The event venue itself, the Spire Academy in Geneva, Ohio, hosted a campaign event for Trump a little less than two weeks before the 2016 presidential election.
Despite Trump claiming last year that the event would feature “the greatest high school athletes” from across the nation, the selection process and criteria remain unclear. Applicants were asked to submit a video essay detailing the impact sports have had on their lives, and to list places outside their home state where they have a “meaningful personal, family, cultural, military, or community connection.” Many of the athletes listed on the event’s website attend Christian private schools or receive homeschooling, and according to The Washington Post, 90% of the participants were white. And while this could have been a unifying event, Trump chose to use it to further punch down on the trans community: “I promise there will be no men playing in women’s sports. You’re not going to see that,” he said in his announcement back in December.
In the lead-up to the tournament, the games were highly publicized in right-wing media and promoted on both official channels and unaffiliated social media accounts sympathetic to Trump and MAGA politics. Some participants heard about the games from relatives in the military, who received emails about the event, while others said they decided to apply after seeing posts by “Granny Bibbins,” an Instagram influencer with 1.8 million followers who says in her bio that she hopes “to inspire the next generation of Moms.”
One of the teens representing Puerto Rico was from Texas, and a girl from California competed for Massachusetts.
It appears that, rather than holding a tournament celebrating things that make both sports and America great — diversity, teamwork, perseverance through failure, separation of church and state, individualism with an eye toward collective good — the event was designed to celebrate a singular, narrow definition of American exceptionalism.
In some cases, the selections didn’t even make geographic sense. One of the teens representing Puerto Rico was from Texas, and a girl from California competed for Massachusetts. “I get a bunch of questions, like ‘why are you representing Massachusetts and not your home state?’” she told CNN. “It’s a little startling,” another white athlete told the Washington Post regarding the tournament’s racial representation. “This is supposed to be the best high school athletes. … It just feels a little concerning not to see very many different types of people.”
(That’s not the only part of the tournament that has puzzled some people. In addition to tonight’s ABC special, the games were streamed live on the ESPN app, and ESPN host Pat McAfee attended the tournament alongside Trump and various network executives. The result is the cross-network platforming of a tournament that spotlights the administration’s messaging but seems to bring little value to ESPN’s and ABC’s programming slates. “All of this feels quite weird,” an unnamed ESPN crewmember told The Washington Post. ABC and ESPN, of course, are owned by Disney, which has clashed repeatedly with the Trump administration.)
As Ja’han Jones noted in an earlier column for MS NOW, this isn’t the first time youth sports have been used for propaganda to promote an image of a nation its leaders want the world to see. The games are being held at a time when the majority of American youth don’t align with the president. According to the most recent Yale Youth Poll, 60% of voters age 18 to 22 “strongly disapprove” of Trump. Meanwhile the country is engaged in a massively unpopular war with Iran, a reality that belies the image of American kids competing in fitness tests and military boot camp-style circuits.
In the end, the Patriot Games felt like a missed opportunity to celebrate the things that make sports and America great.
Trump is right that sports competitions can be unifying, crossing party lines to create a shared identity among athletes and fans alike. But this administration and its allies keep trying to force through a version of sports that only caters to them and their ideals. To borrow from Michael Jordan, liberals, and their kids, love sports too.
The post The confounding, divisive messaging of Trump’s Patriot Games appeared first on MS NOW.
