A prime-time special showcasing the White House-backed "Patriot Games," a nationwide children's athletic competition, failed to provide the cultural win the Trump administration may have hoped for, according to a critical review of the broadcast.
The one-hour special, produced by Freedom 250, the same White House-aligned nonprofit behind Trump's White House UFC fight and the poorly received Great American State Fair, capped a run of high-profile cultural events that have largely fizzled this summer, including jokes that "bombed" at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, according to The Guardian's Aaron Timms.
"Culturally, it’s been a tough few months for Donald Trump," Timms wrote. "Could the Patriot Games, a nationwide competition to find the American schoolchildren most adept at traversing a set of monkey bars, help rescue the summer? Last night we got our answer: no."
The Patriot Games concluded this week at a training facility outside Cleveland, with each of two champions awarded $125,000 in college scholarship money, and Timms criticized the broadcast's pacing and tone.
"ABC put us through 45 minutes of highlights from the Games’ qualifying rounds, a test of spectator endurance every bit as trying as anything inflicted on the competition’s collection of awkward 15-year-olds," he wrote. "To a soundtrack of rap-rock and screeching eagles, we watched as various high schoolers – 'one male and one female from every state and some tribal nations and territories,' as the broadcast put it, and almost all of them white – tested themselves on the medicine ball toss, the agility shuttle, the 55m hurdles, and the flexed arm hang."
The special closed with a brief, widely mocked interview between Trump and ESPN personality Laura Rutledge, in which the president offered a muted response, "Well I love Ohio," before adding that the competition, created by his own administration, exceeded his expectations, "I got here and I didn't know what to expect."
The finals winners – Kennadi Fuhrman and Rockwell Myers – thanked God from the victory dais as Trump presented them with small trophies and their checks, which Timms described as "dime-store MAGA theatrics" that called to mind the Hitler Youth.
"But as a TV spectacle, these Patriot Games did have one virtue that set them apart from the endless flotsam of 250th birthday kitsch that has crammed our screens this summer," Timms concluded. "They were, at the very least, brief."
