Even after all these years, many elected Democrats and liberal commentators still can’t help but fall for President Donald Trump’s bait. And they’re doing exactly that, yet again, after the president announced a new athletic competition he’s dubbing the “Patriot Games.”
“In the fall, we will host the first-ever Patriot Games, an unprecedented four-day athletic event featuring the greatest high school athletes,” Trump said in his presidential address this week. “One young man and one woman from each state and territory. But I promise there will be no men playing in women’s sports.”
Democrats and left-wing commentators decided to compare a voluntary athletic competition to the dystopian fiction novel The Hunger Games, where children are drafted at random to compete in gladiator-style fights to the death. Liberal YouTube star Brian Tyler Cohen immediately posted to his millions of followers, “We asked for affordable healthcare, and Republicans are giving us The Hunger Games.” Viral tweet after viral tweet made this same comparison. But it wasn’t just online commentators engaging in this hyperbole.
Social media accounts for the Democratic Party posted compilations of clips from “The Hunger Games” movies and directly compared Trump to President Snow, the evil dictator in the dystopian series, quoting, “And so it was decreed that, each year, the various districts of Panem would offer up, in tribute, one young man and woman to fight to the death in a pageant of honor, courage and sacrifice.”
The Trump administration immediately pounced on this hysterical response, writing on X, “Of course Democrats hate this — it doesn’t involve confused men stealing medals from women and calling it ‘equality.’ Celebrating elite young men and women who earn their recognition through hard work and talent is what real patriotism looks like.”
Could Democrats have fallen any more perfectly for this trap?
Of course, whether intentional or not, there are some extremely superficial similarities between the Patriot Games and The Hunger Games. The names are similar, having one male and female competitor from each state or “district” is similar, and, well, that’s kind of it. But the differences are profound, not superficial. No one is being conscripted into these games. No one is dying or being forced to kill others. And no one is being forced to watch it or tune in.
High school athletes are competing in a tournament. That’s literally it. So, most normal Americans will either like the idea or simply not care about it all. Then, when they see the Democrats melting down over it and making hysterical comparisons, they will roll their eyes and tune out the alarmism.
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The most tragic part about this is that it plays perfectly into the boy who cried wolf phenomenon that lets Trump get away with so much. Democrats and left-wing critics so routinely cry wolf — or cry authoritarianism, racism, etc. — that when Trump actually does genuinely alarming things, from imprisoning people without due process to arresting immigrants based on their ideas, it blends in with all the noise.
It would genuinely be funny if it weren’t also so harmful. Unfortunately, if Trump’s Democratic critics haven’t learned not to fall for his bait after all these years, they likely never will.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
