Donald Trump is 80 years old, and his poll numbers, especially among young people, are as low as they have ever been. So his Patriot Games, an athletic competition that the administration and its MAGA allies have been promoting recently, is a bit of multipurpose propaganda: a ploy by America’s widely disliked president to appear aligned with the youth and invested in their vigor.

One might have thought it wise for Trump to steer clear of teenage competitions given the controversy surrounding his conduct at the teenage beauty pageant he once owned. But more recently the president has been eager to use young people as political props, as he did in July with his civics competition (which has faced allegations of being rigged).

The president is scheduled to be on-hand in Geneva, Ohio, on Tuesday for the final day of his Hunger Games knockoff, to award cash prizes to the competition’s winners. How’s that for a scene? America’s wannabe king descending into middle America to reward a couple of kids after they’ve sweat it out for cash in his corrupt, war-torn economy. 

The competition — brought to you by Freedom 250, the corporate-backed organization created by Trump allies to hijack the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration — seems to be largely a vehicle for political propaganda. A Washington Post dispatch on the competition spotlighted children chanting Trump’s political slogans, donning clothes marketing his political movement, and parroting his rhetoric.

The racial makeup of the participants was apparently noteworthy, too:

In an email, a Freedom 250 spokesperson didn’t address questions regarding the selection criteria, stating the organization looked for “America’s next generation of leaders, competitors and champions.” What stood out to many upon arriving in Ohio, though, was that roughly 90 percent of the athletes participating were White. Weird doesn’t begin to cover that one.

History tells us that bigoted authoritarians have seen value in politicizing youth sports. Adolf Hitler’s regime in Germany used youth sports in partnership with organizations like the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls to promote Nazi ideology. Physical fitness was marketed as a major component of the annual “Reich Vocational Competition for Youth,” in which hundreds of thousands of German kids participated starting in the mid-1930s. 

And Hitler’s official photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, even captured an image in 1940 of Hitler Youth participating in their summer “war games,” an athletic competition hosted in present-day Poland as the Nazi regime expanded its footprint in Europe. 

The caption of that photo, now preserved in The New York Public Library, reads “The Hitler Youth held their Summer War Games in the great stadium in Breslau.” It continues, “They showed that sports, as a permanent part of German life, go on despite the war.” One can certainly hear the echoes of Trump’s propaganda-fueled teen competition, which is also taking place during a war.

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