HARPERSFIELD TOWNSHIP, Ohio – The White House had chosen one boy to lead a reading from the Bible, so Reagan Tuck Dukes III, the blond-haired, blue-eyed linebacker from Texas, stood before dozens of other teens who had come from all across the country for a new athletic contest known as the Patriot Games.
They’d all heard the haters online who called it propaganda, compared it to the Hunger Games, blasted its overwhelming whiteness and labeled its athletes the new Hitler Youth. But none of that fazed RT. He’d just come back from a weeklong mission trip to Peru and understood how lucky he was to live in the United States of America.
The room was full of his people. They loved Jesus and sports and the flag. The night before, they’d marveled at the stories of a Medal of Honor recipient who’d saved lives in Vietnam. And they’d heard his message: “Remember: Everyone is Team USA.” But RT knew they all felt tempted to chase personal glory. Everyone wanted one of the two $125,000 scholarships; everyone wanted to be crowned champion by the president. So, RT chose Hebrews 12:1-2.
“Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles,” he said. “And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”
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It was mid-August, the waning days of summer, the twilight of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. The party planners at Freedom 250 had pulled off a series of hurried, expensive spectacles, including a prayer rally, a state fair and a mixed-martial-arts bout on the lawn of the White House. And even though their national civics competition was marred by accusations of bias, they had also set a record for the biggest fireworks display of all time.
The Patriot Games were in part an attempt to reach Gen Z, which polling shows is far less patriotic than older generations in a country where overall national pride just hit a 25-year low. In a June Gallup poll, only 14% of adults under 34 said they were “extremely proud” to be an American.
A few kids were trying to do their part. The girl representing the Cherokee Nation had said in her application that she wanted to help bring patriotism back to the U.S. The boy from Mississippi said he would’ve been here even if the commander-in-chief was Joe Biden. And RT understood that he’d been selected because he’d attracted an audience on social media by posting faith-based videos, such as when he walked through a field carrying a barbell with “the weight Jesus did on the cross.”
“No matter where you fall in this competition, your race isn’t over,” RT said.
Not long after, the kids tied on bandanas, Sharpied Bible verses onto their skin and underlined their eyes with stripes of red, white and blue. They took the field as MAGA hats filled the stands, the national anthem blared from the speakers and a 200-person crew from ESPN turned on its cameras. The hosts welcomed America to a youth sports academy called SPIRE in a speck of pastoral heartland.
Outside these walls, Harpersfield was a small town grappling with the challenges of modern rural life. But it had dropped everything to assume the role of Everytown, USA. The people shared a mindset: We’re going to roll up our sleeves, be together, smile. And it was here, under the hot lights of TV, that President Donald Trump’s vision for the country reached full, ephemeral bloom.
* * *
Down on the turf, waiting for field day to start, one girl turned to her group.
“We’re, like, all blond!” she said.
The girl from Washington state, one of the few brunettes, quickly chimed in.
“I was blond when I was a baby.”
Who were these kids? The selection process was rigorous, organizers say. The kids had to answer prompts, disclose their sex assigned at birth and list places outside their home state where they had a “meaningful personal, family, cultural, military, or community connection.” Freedom 250 and a youth sports company called 3STEP picked 60 boys and 60 girls based on their essay, video and athleticism.
In the stands, parents described a murky, chaotic process. Applications had opened just six weeks ago, and they learned their kids were selected about a week before kickoff. They got no information on which sports would be included.
One man suggested the administration didn’t promote it well “to keep out advocacy for certain issues.” The grandmother of the girl representing Guam speculated that Big Tech had suppressed ads because of the event’s ties to Trump.
“I’m a big conspiracy theorist,” she said.
When the kids learned they were in, they freaked out. They flooded social media with AI graphics, reaction videos and unboxings of a welcome package that included a commemorative coin featuring Trump’s as-yet-unrealized 250-foot arch.
By the time they took the field, at least seven kids were representing places they did not live. The girl representing Maine was from New Hampshire; the New Jersey boy went to school in Texas. One boy jokingly cheered on his friend representing Puerto Rico by yelling, “Let’s go Alabama-Virginia-Washington, D.C.!”
Field day included six stations: broad jump, flexed-arm hang, “pro agility shuttle,” 100-meter dash, 55-meter hurdles and an event no one had ever seen in which kids threw medicine balls as far as they could.
Unlike the civics contest, the Patriot Games had transparent scoring. The kids got 60 points for winning an individual event, 59 for finishing second and so on. Organizers wanted even teams for dodgeball and kickball, so they paired the highest- and lowest-ranked players. The ESPN livestream, which was playing on a couple of big TVs, occasionally flashed an update.
Even as the scoreboard separated them, it was hard not to see the kids as winners already winning. They had founded clubs and won elections. They built robots and spoke multiple languages. One girl with cerebral palsy played lacrosse and advocated for the disabled. Many had well-connected parents. There was the son of the athletic director at the University of Georgia. The grandson of a tech entrepreneur. The younger sister of the girl who’d won the national civics contest, whose father led Wyoming Catholic College and was a close friend of the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Other parents kept walking up to shake hands with RT Dukes II, a prominent oil-and-gas executive who last year received a cash bonus of $135,000.
Dukes’ son was something of a celebrity. Freedom 250 collaborated with him on social media; the public relations staff highlighted him as often as it could; and when he caught a line drive in kickball, someone else’s dad yelled, “Let’s go, Texas!”
In the background, monitoring it all, was SPIRE CEO Jonathan Ehrenfeld. The Baltimore-based real estate investor said he had purchased the northern Ohio sports academy in 2019 because he believed the U.S. was ready for another elite academy like IMG in Florida. It was also a good deal; he paid $7.4 million for a campus that had cost $100 million to build. Ehrenfeld then built hotels and restaurants, expanded its facilities and purchased farms for future development. A local columnist mourned the pivot from community to profit.
It’s not clear why Freedom 250 put the games in Ohio instead of D.C., as was originally announced. Ehrenfeld is not a big political donor and said Freedom 250 approached him in early summer. Together, he said, they pulled off a two-year event in two months. He declined to disclose the terms of their deal; Freedom 250 declined to say how much the event cost and how much of that cost was covered by taxpayers.
As the kids left the field for the day, two people were still out there working. Jim and Jimmy Doherty, the longtime father-and-son garbagemen of Harpersfield, had heard the Secret Service needed 30, 8-foot-tall steel dumpsters ASAP. It was Jimmy’s only day off; he was supposed to take his young son fishing. But instead, he spent eight hours blocking off a stretch of tree line because it could, a couple nights later, offer a gunman a good shot at the president.
Inside, the kids were relaxing, recovering, dancing, gaming, flirting, posting, bonding and staying up past curfew. Outside, Jim and Jimmy were finishing what some had started referring to as “the border wall.” They didn’t know who would pay them or when. But it was a job that needed doing — and they, like the kids, were proud to have been called.
* * *
The next morning, Marie Paul leaned on a railing overlooking a turf field. Her daughter Oluwasheyi, who had just run a course of mashed-up sports known as the “varsity circuit,” was napping. Paul still couldn’t believe they were here.
Shay, as her daughter was known, hadn’t applied until about a week ago. She was a gymnast and sprinter who didn’t play traditional team sports. But a week earlier, Paul had gotten a text from an acquaintance who said there’d been a last-minute injury, and did Shay want to represent her home in the U.S. Virgin Islands?
Paul had hesitated. She believed the event was another Republican political tool. She suspected they’d be some of the only Black people there. But she had always been an independent thinker, and to her, the calculus was simple.
You have an agenda? Well, so do I.
Paul wanted Shay to see the world. Meet people. Be on ESPN. Learn from other athletes. Feel deep soreness in her arms and find within herself the will to keep fighting.
The night before, Shay had come home upset. A boy had high-fived all his teammates except her. Paul knew it wasn’t a white-Black thing — the boy was also Black. Maybe he skipped Shay on purpose, maybe Shay misread the situation. Either way, Paul didn’t want her daughter’s discomfort to linger, so she talked to the coaches, who brought the kids together. The boy apologized and said he meant it as a joke.
“She felt better about it,” Paul said, and just that one small lesson in communication made the whole trip worth it.
As Paul kept telling me stories, a PR official came over to the empty bleachers and stood behind her. Paul hesitated, then continued, saying that she appreciated Freedom 250 including far-flung territories in the event.
“Because it is difficult to be patriotic when you are —”
“Sorrrryyyy,” the official interrupted. She explained there was a new media policy: The handful of independent reporters at the event could stand only in certain areas, and if they wanted to move, they had to be accompanied by a PR official, who would also approve and observe all interviews.
Later, it would become clear that Freedom 250 had created the policy in response to a story in The Washington Post. One anonymous ESPN staffer had suggested that the government bullied the Walt Disney Company, which owns ESPN, into televising the event as part of a broader fight that had already ensnared comedian Jimmy Kimmel and some of the company’s broadcast licenses.
The PR official allowed me to ask a few final questions. Paul said she empathized with the government’s struggle to control the narrative taught to children in the age of social media. And she praised the Patriot Games as a rare and invaluable cultural exchange for the Virgin Islands.
“My daughter feels more included within her country than ever before,” she said.
I asked Paul if we could sit together to watch Shay’s next event.
Yes, she said.
No, the PR official said.
The official shepherded me back to the media viewing area.
* * *
On the other end of the facility, a boy named Christian Berezay was crawling, high-stepping and weaving through a military-style obstacle course called “Operation Endurance.”
“Let’s go, Christian!” D.J. Berezay hollered, trying to fulfill his son’s request to be the loudest parent in the building.
In the past year, D.J. said, he had witnessed a miracle. His son, who is on the autism spectrum, had always struggled to focus. But then his mom heard about a medication called leucovorin. Typically prescribed to moderate harmful effects of cancer drugs, it was now being touted by the Trump administration as a treatment for autism. Nationwide prescriptions surged 700%.
In March, the Food and Drug Administration said there wasn’t enough evidence to approve leucovorin as a treatment for autism. But the Berezays were already believers. Christian said the pill made his brain wake up, and in months, his parents said, his reading level jumped from first grade to ninth. He started winning wrestling matches.
D.J. knew there were better athletes than his son in the state of Washington, but even if they’d applied, he figured Christian was chosen in part to highlight an underdog’s story.
Down on the course, Christian somersaulted over an A-frame, tip-toed across an L-shaped balance beam, flipped a big tire, caught it before it hit the ground and flipped it again, which made a couple parents ooh.
“I have to thank the Holy Father for giving me this opportunity,” Christian told ESPN.
All afternoon, the kids cheered each other on. They celebrated excellence but were loudest when group-mates labored through monkey bars or whiffed at T-ball or struggled to serve a volleyball over the net. The final stage of the “varsity circuit” was running the bases, and even though several kids missed home plate, no one made them go back and touch it.
“It’s not a normal athletic event,” a security guard told a volunteer. “They all want each other to win.”
Early in the evening, the coaches gathered the kids to announce the Top 16. RT made it as the boy’s No. 12 seed; Christian and Shay did not advance. The semifinals started right away. They split into groups for tug-of-war and played several rounds of head-to-head Pop-A-Shot. In both games, the winners each got 30 points. The kids were tracking the scores now, and when the boy from Florida beat RT in Pop-A-Shot, he jumped up and down, because he knew he’d secured the last spot in the finals.
As a coach announced the final four, RT stood in place, his mouth a thin line. But when the girls screamed and mobbed each other, and the crowd started chanting “USA!,” he smiled and dapped everyone up. It was just as the Medal of Honor recipient had said: Everyone was on the same team.
* * *
The morning the president would arrive, Deputy John Jacobson from the county sheriff’s office got a request to check out a white cargo van parked across the street from SPIRE. He detained the driver, a New York City resident from Ukraine who did not speak English, and called the bomb squad. The dog sniffed and went nuts. Jacobson shut down nearby businesses and roadways.
Officers interviewed the driver with a translator app and reviewed receipts. It turned out there was no threat; the driver was just delivering confetti cannons to the Patriot Games.
The incident captured how hard the community was straining to look its best in front of the nation. While Trump had campaigned at SPIRE in 2016, the local paper reported that no sitting president had visited Ashtabula County since Abraham Lincoln. And the county was ecstatic to host this president — after voting for Reagan twice, then Democrats seven straight times, it flipped to Trump in 2016 and ran up the score for him in 2020 and 2024, when he won by nearly 30 points.
To prepare, Ehrenfeld had asked the trustees to pretty up Harpersfield. The trustees could be wary of Ehrenfeld’s grand plans, which had brought a surge in traffic and contributed to a drop in water pressure as the little community swelled. But they saw the Games as an honor and an opportunity. In addition to hosting the president, they could introduce their beloved town to America.
The three trustees — Ed Spoor, Ed Pristov and Lisa Linehan — hit the phones. The volunteer fire department brought lunch-meat sandwiches to the Secret Service. Bob Mramor made bouquets of petunias, lobellias and million bells. Landon Linehan and Connor Reeves welded brackets to hang the flowers on lampposts. Stephanie Siegel promoted the local wine industry. Ruff Neon Signs finally took down the old “ESTAURANT” eyesore. Three to six cops — roughly the same number responsible for all 702 square miles of county land — signed up for off-duty shifts to guard SPIRE around the clock. The trustees watered flowers, picked up trash and enlisted friends and family to help line the road from the interstate exit ramp all the way to campus with about 800 mini American flags.
When SPIRE said it planned to erect a 150-foot-tall flag pole, which was nearly four times the local height limit, the trustees said the academy had to get public approval. “You can’t just ignore the people,” Pristov said. The board of zoning appeals called a special meeting. No one opposed the flag, several attendees said, not even the lifers who always hated change.
The only problem was signs. The turnaround time was too tight for the sign maker, so when people drove into SPIRE, nothing said “Welcome to Harpersfield.” All the press releases, social media posts and ESPN graphics said the Games were happening in Geneva, which has twice as many people and lies 3 miles north.
By showtime, though, the trustees couldn’t have been prouder. They took me on a long tour of the community and praised everyone’s talent and hard work and sacrifice.
“Our community is what makes us so powerful,” Linehan said.
That evening, a crowd roughly the population of Harpersfield showed up at SPIRE. The field house looked like the set of a game show with lights, VIP seats and an obstacle course straight out of “American Ninja Warrior.” The vibe was MAGA rally, with red hats, tributes to Charlie Kirk and one shirt that bore an illustration of Trump and George Washington standing back-to-back and wearing sunglasses. The stands were about three-quarters full.
Helicopter blades thundered outside. The crowd vibrated. The scoreboard showed 45-47. The kids marched in holding state flags and wearing red, white and blue.
* * *
Maybe the only act of defiance of the entire Patriot Games happened when almost the entire fieldhouse was distracted. The president walked out of the tunnel, the announcer screamed “DONALD J. TRUMP!” and the crowd popped.
“We love you!”
“We love you, Mr. President!”
“2028!”
At the top of the bleachers, one kid did not jump to his feet and scream. A boy from the Midwest rose slowly and kept his hands at his sides. He did not clap as Trump led the finalists down a walkway lined by fireworks. He did not clap when they took center stage. He did not clap for the president the entire night. But when the national anthem began, he placed his right hand over his heart.
The crowd was as supportive as the kids had been: They cheered both racers all the way through the finish line and nodded approvingly when the competitors hugged.
For most of the 30-minute competition, Trump did not appear engaged. Even though he sat feet from the course, and even though other VIPs craned their necks to watch the kids race by, Trump sat motionless and kept his eyes on the big screen straight ahead. Once, a girl lost her grip on a gym ring and fell to the ground. The crowd gasped. Trump did not react.
At halftime, the president did an interview with ESPN. He praised Ohio, listed teams he liked in the upcoming NFL season (the finale of which will be broadcast on ESPN) and lauded the successes of America’s 250th celebrations. “I really am proud of the group of people in this room,” he said. “You see the spirit and the love of our great country. Our country’s never done better.”
Later, Trump helped present the gold trophies. He congratulated the winners, Rockwell Myers from Utah and Kennadi Fuhrman from Kansas, and the confetti cannons boomed. Trump boogied through about half of “YMCA,” and then he waved goodbye and left the stage.
Later, kids would gush on social media, “Best week of my entire life” and “I’m so grateful that I got this opportunity!” They would tell interviewers they’d made new, lifelong friends. One boy would decry “lies on the internet” and say “Freedom 250 did a phenomenal job.”
Marie Paul would say her daughter had new aunties in Hawaii and Alaska. Christian Berezay would keep taking his pills and tinkering with engines. RT Dukes III would post a video in which he tells Trump, “Jesus loves you, Mr. President!”
The township of Harpersfield would go back to debating how to handle SPIRE’s growth, including who would pay for a new stoplight near campus. SPIRE would prepare to start its new school year, and the CEO would say he was only 20% through his developmental master plan.
But that night, after the finals, they went home talking about what a production it all had been. The big American flag twisted in the breeze.
Every kid left with a gold medal just as round and shiny as every other kid’s medal. Everyone said they felt lucky to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
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