Late last year, President Trump announced that America’s 250th birthday celebration would include the “first-ever Patriot Games, an unprecedented four-day athletic event featuring the greatest high school athletes — one young man and one young woman from each state and territory.” Two winners would split $250,000 in scholarship money.

Comparisons to The Hunger Games were inevitable. From a structural standpoint, when you have two kids from each region competing in a nationally televised game, it’s going to remind people of the hit book and film franchise. And that goes double when the event is hosted by an authoritarian-leaning regime.

Of course, hosting a national sports competition for kids doesn’t have to be political. Freedom 250, the Trump-affiliated organization putting on the event, could have kept the games nonpartisan and focused on celebrating diverse student athletes who represent the best of our nation, proving the naysayers wrong.

Much like the Great American State Fair, the whole thing was a Trump-infused flop. The event has been streaming live all week on the ESPN app, and the highlights were condensed into a one-hour special that airs tonight on ABC. But most Americans seem unaware that the competition is happening. And while Freedom 250 did manage to avoid creating another physical representation of our crumbling democracy, people who did watch the competition were largely disappointed and baffled. Here’s all the weird stuff you missed from the Patriot Games.

No one knows how the contestants were selected.

You might think that there would be some kind of regional qualifying events, held in coordination with the states, to determine the 100 “greatest high school athletes” from across the nation. But the application on Freedom 250’s website said all the kids needed to do was prove their age and location, then submit a YouTube video explaining why they should be picked.

From there, the process was largely a mystery. Freedom 250 told the Washignton Post that “submissions were compiled into a composite score, blending athletic performance data with the strength of each applicant’s essay and video.”

Even competitors were confused about what that actually means. And they only learned they’d been selected two weeks before the competition:

From there, everything became much murkier, multiple families said Sunday. Freedom 250 notified most competitors that they were selected in late July, about two weeks before the big event. Athletes scrambled to book travel, unsure of the process through which they were chosen.

From there, everything became much murkier, multiple families said Sunday. Freedom 250 notified most competitors that they were selected in late July, about two weeks before the big event. Athletes scrambled to book travel, unsure of the process through which they were chosen.

Some competitors don’t live in the states they represented.

The 120 competitors were supposed to come from all 50 U.S. states and a variety of territories, military bases, and tribal nations. But some teens were inexplicably chosen to represent states they have no connection to, as CNN reported:

Some students were chosen to represent states where they don’t reside. The pick for Puerto Rico is a young man from Texas. New Jersey’s ambassador attends a private Christian school in Texas. The female competitor for Massachusetts, 16-year-old Bobbi Vickers, attends school in California.

Some students were chosen to represent states where they don’t reside. The pick for Puerto Rico is a young man from Texas. New Jersey’s ambassador attends a private Christian school in Texas. The female competitor for Massachusetts, 16-year-old Bobbi Vickers, attends school in California.

Discrimination against transgender people was a core theme.

Trump knocked transgender high-school athletes in his video announcing the Patriot Games, remarking, “But I promise there will be no men playing in women’s sports.”

This may partially explain why Maine’s female competitor was a New Hampshire resident. In her audition video, Rebekah Roberts identified herself as a resident of Cornish, New Hampshire, and said she missed out on two years of athletic competition because her school “chose to stand by American morals that people once died for.” According to The Advocate, “She appears to be referencing Mid Vermont Christian School, which in 2023 forfeited a Division IV girls’ basketball playoff game rather than play against a team with a transgender athlete on its........

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