Last week, ABC broadcast its coverage of the 2026 Patriot Games, an event United States President Donald Trump announced last year as part of the country’s America 250 celebration marking the 250th anniversary of the United States.
The event, which promised to include “the greatest high school athletes” in the country as they competed for scholarship money, was broadcast in a primetime slot on ABC, was attended by Trump himself, and was praised by ESPN star Pat McAfee, who also attended the event alongside the president.
Despite all of that, the television ratings suggest that the event was an overwhelming failure, and Trump has been openly mocked as a result.
2026 Patriot GamesTrump unveiled the Patriot Games in 2025 as a first-of-its-kind athletic competition intended to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.
“In the fall, we will host the first-ever ‘Patriot Games,’ an unprecedented 4-day athletic event featuring the greatest high school athletes, one young man and one young woman from each state and territory,” Trump said at the time.
According to the original plans, the athletes would be “tested on the skills from the Presidential Fitness Test, go through a military-inspired boot camp circuit, and finalists will compete in an obstacle course designed to test strategy and skill.”
In reality, though, the competition came across more like an elaborate elementary school field day, including games like dodgeball and pop-a-shot. And given the selection process, it’s questionable at best whether the participants were truly among the country’s top high school athletes.
Embarrassing ViewershipDespite airing on ABC during a primetime 9 p.m. time slot, with the network dedicating an hour to showcasing the competition’s top moments, the Patriot Games attracted a remarkably small audience.
In fact, the event was easily beaten by reruns of a game show that first premiered 43 years ago.
“According to viewership data compiled by Awful Announcing’s Manny Soloway, ABC’s one-hour telecast of the Patriot Games, which amounted to a highlight show of the competitions’ best moments, drew just 1.21 million viewers last Thursday. One week prior, ABC aired Press Your Luck in the same timeslot and scored 2.86 million viewers. The week before that, Press Your Luck averaged 2.88 million viewers. The Trumped-up Patriot Games could only scrounge up less than half the audience of a game show that’s been around for 43 years,” Awful Announcing reported this week.
It’s hard to view those numbers as anything other than an embarrassing outcome for Trump and everyone involved in creating the event. McAfee expressed optimism about the event’s future, describing it as a “big deal” that he believes “is going to continue.” The viewership figures, however, paint a dramatically different picture.
Donald Trump mockedNeedless to say, this embarrassment led to a lot of reactions from the media, who mocked Trump for the failed event.
“Would have done better with more Pop-A-Shot,” wrote Ben Koo of Awful Announcing in a post on X.
“These people genuinely thought they’d permanently taken control of the culture when Trump won again,” wrote journalist Mike Rothschild in a post.
“Only 1.2 million viewers!” mocked prominent politics and culture writer Nick Field in a post on X.
“Not a single person I know watched it — not my Trump loving buddy from college, my Republican dad, not any of the conservative influencers I know, nobody. It’s impressive how little cultural impact Trump has,” added political commentator Mike Nellis in a post.
“MAGA is smoke and mirrors. The sooner people realize this, the quicker we’ll usher their ‘power’ out of our society. It ain’t half the country anymore (if it ever was), it’s like 25-30% TOPS. Accepting this is our way out of this frustrating mess,” wrote film and TV critic John Rocha in a post on X.
“Every metric that he can’t steal or fake suggests that this dude is a nobody,” wrote retired combat sports commentator Ryan McKinnell, who previously worked for SiriusXM, Busted Open, National Examiner, ESPN Vegas, and Yahoo Sports. “America hates this man.”
Clearly, the interest in the Patriot Games was not what Trump or anyone else involved had expected.
The post ‘America hates this man’: Donald Trump mocked after embarrassing sports event appeared first on The Comeback: Today’s Top Sports Stories & Reactions.
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