ABC recently broadcasted the 2026 Patriot Games, an event introduced last year by U.S. President Donald Trump as a key component of the country’s America 250 festivities marking its semiquincentennial anniversary.
Despite garnering highly positive feedback from ESPN’s Pat McAfee, who was present at the tournament alongside Trump, the television ratings for the spectacle were exceptionally disappointing.
The 2026 Patriot Games
Designed to honor America’s 250-year milestone, this novel sports contest was first unveiled by Trump back in 2025.
“During the autumn season, we are going to present the inaugural ‘Patriot Games,’ a landmark four-day sports gathering showcasing the premier high school competitors, with one male and one female representative selected from every state and territory,” Trump announced when revealing the event.
Organizers pledged that participants would undergo “evaluations based on Presidential Fitness Test metrics, navigate a military-style training course, and final contenders would face off on an obstacle track created to evaluate tactical planning and physical capability.”
In reality, though, the tournament resembled an upscale grade school sports day, and given how competitors were chosen, it remains highly questionable whether any of the participants truly ranked among the top high school sports talents nationwide.
Disastrous Ratings
Although the network allocated a prime-time 9 p.m. slot on ABC for a one-hour special highlighting the tournament’s top plays, the broadcast failed to attract a substantial audience.
Truly, the sports showcase was heavily outpaced in viewership by repeat episodes of a television game show created over four decades ago.
“Based on rating statistics gathered by Awful Announcing’s Manny Soloway, the one-hour ABC broadcast of the Patriot Games, which functioned as a recap of the tournament’s highlights, attracted only 1.21 million viewers on Thursday night. Conversely, the previous week’s broadcast of Press Your Luck in that identical time period pulled in 2.86 million viewers, following an average of 2.88 million viewers the week preceding that. This heavily promoted athletic showcase generated less than half of the viewership commanded by a classic game show format that debuted 43 years ago,” Awful Announcing detailed in a recent report.
Without a doubt, these figures represent a humiliating setback for Trump, who dedicated twelve months to promoting the contest and even watched the action live from the crowd.
While McAfee remained hopeful about the tournament’s longevity, labeling it a “significant event” that he believes “will keep going,” the actual rating data indicates a much bleaker outlook.
The article Donald Trump’s ‘Patriot Games’ meets a humiliating outcome originally appeared on The Comeback: Today’s Top Sports Stories & Reactions.
