How to describe President Trump’s Freedom 250 Patriot Games? The contest, which took place earlier this week, brought students ages 14 to 17 together from across America to answer the question: What if your high-school gym teacher walked headfirst into a pole and was then asked to throw an Olympics with a budget of exactly $6 and three weeks’ notice?

Trump boasted when announcing the games that “there will be no men playing in women’s sports,” but after watching almost all of the Patriot Games, I’ve realized he meant that nobody, regardless of gender, would be playing anything recognizable as a sport.

When you turn on ESPN’s coverage of the Patriot Games, you see a camera pan slowly over several small American flags stuck into ill-tended grass, while a tune reminiscent of (but legally distinct from) the Olympics theme plays. Welcome to SPIRE Academy, in Geneva, Ohio, where 120 competitors, one boy and one girl from each of the 50 states and … some territories, gathered for the Patriot Games.

Are these the best high-school athletes the United States has to offer? In a word, no. Well, is the person representing Massachusetts at least from the state of Massachusetts? Also no! Well, does this field of competitors at least look like America? Not the America I remember! But Stephen Miller has been busy.

Then what is this? It’s a Trump-produced spectacle, of course! Who chose these contestants? What are they doing at SPIRE Academy, in Geneva, Ohio? And more important, what are these events? The kids are not the reason that at the end of three days, I feel almost punished for trying to take the Games seriously.

I will say that at least the announcers seem to be equally bewildered by what they’re witnessing. Over the course of the games, I notice that their confident proclamations about what is in store for the contestants keep changing from event to event and day to day. Will Victory Hoops (Pop-A-Shot arcade basketball) feature the top-eight or the top-16 contenders? No one seems to know! (It ultimately features the top 16, despite numerous confident announcements and graphics to the contrary.)

If you tuned in only to the finale—sorry, the “Freedom Finale”; every aspect of these games has patriotic branding—you might be forgiven for assuming that the Patriot Games leading up to this point had operated on any kind of recognizable human logic. The finale features four contestants competing on an American Ninja Warrior–style course, and the other 116 competitors lined up behind them in patriotic jerseys. They enter the arena to stirring music and dramatic lighting while sparklers blaze. It looks as though things have been running in a professional manner. Someone tuning in just then might imagine that the whole competition featured such standard tests of skill and not events such as Here, Play Dodgeball, and We’ll Give Half of You 30 Points! They have not been watching the Patriot Games like I have.

Some elements of the Patriot Games make a minimal amount of sense. The contest, for instance, begins with something called the Presidential Qualifier, with a 100-meter dash, 55-meter hurdles, a Flexed Arm Hang, a Pro Agility Shuttle, a Broad Jump, and a Med Ball Throw. After the Presidential Qualifier comes Dodgeball and Kickball. Each event, as far as I can tell, is worth 60 points. But I could be wrong! The way Dodgeball and Kickball work is that you are divided into six teams (Team Freedom, Team Liberty, Team Valor, Team Honor, Team Unity, and Team Courage, of course!) via snake seeding.

Day two offers two of the most spectacular events I have ever seen. Operation Endurance is a military-inspired obstacle course, and everyone is immediately relieved by how much sense it makes. Ropes to climb! An area in which to army-crawl! A jerrican carry! A balance beam! Yes! And you can tell who has won because there is a timer!

But then comes … the Varsity Circuit. This is where you can sense things coming off the rails a bit. The event is divided into six stations, each with an activity representing a sport. There are two football stations, where you run through obstacles and then throw a football at a target. There is a volleyball station, where you serve three balls successfully over the net. There is a baseball station, where you whack a ball off a tee and then run the bases. For the soccer station, you kick a ball at a target. And for tennis, the activity is … catching three tennis balls in a row. Catching! That thing you famously do during the sport of tennis! One announcer tries to zhuzh it up a little bit, so we get this amazing description: “They will be stationed about 15 feet away from the tennis-ball launcher. They have to actually receive this, almost like a punt reception, and they have to do that three times.”

And while they do this, their families wave signs that say things such as ELIZA IS OUR PATRIOT.

Underwhelming as these challenges are, they are also … not that easy for all of the contestants, which means that if you managed to prove your patriotism sufficiently to get selected for the Patriot Games, you’ll most likely win the prize of failing to catch a tennis ball on national television (or at least deep within the bowels of the ESPN app) while the announcer generously remarks that the lights are awfully bright and the volleyball net does seem pretty high. Certainly not a humiliation for you or the president whose idea this was!

After the Varsity Circuit and Operation Endurance, we select our top 16, based on total points. Once we reach the top 16, any pretense that this is an open field for competition where anyone can win gets joyfully abandoned. The top-four scorers are all placed on a single team for tug-of-war against the bottom-four scorers, and—you won’t be surprised to hear this!—they win.

After this, we have Pop-A-Shot basketball! Yes, the arcade game! “Why can’t they just shoot real basketballs? Isn’t this all being filmed on a basketball court? Isn’t this allegedly an athletic competition?” HUSH! JUST ACCEPT THE PREMISE! THESE ARE PROBABLY THE BEST ATHLETES, AND THESE ARE PROBABLY LOGICAL THINGS FOR THEM TO BE DOING!

Look, as someone who has watched Slippery Stairs, a contest in which people try to climb up a slippery stair and some of them fall down and others do not, I understand the power of good announcing to make almost anything seem like a legitimate competition. But the power of good announcing can go only so far, and it cannot do anything when you are watching two students play arcade basketball head-to-head for no discernible reason, and you already know the points will not matter.

Trump appears for the Freedom Finale, which has much higher production value than anything that has come before. “I like a lot of finales,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of good finales.” (Did he prepare those remarks?) During the finale, multiple people fall off the Legally–Distinct–From–American Ninja Warrior Race-Course Equipment, allowing their opponents to win. Thrilling! Everyone gets a medal, and the winners get trophies and scholarship checks. Trump stands smiling in the middle of it all. It looks very Soviet, although the Soviets probably would have realized that the tennis-ball catching was too embarrassing to televise.

Is this America? No, this is Trump’s America, where everything is made up and the points don’t matter, but our leader still wants you to cheer as if they do. Just don’t tell me these are tests of merit. I watched that Pop-A-Shot basketball! Don’t tell me this is the best we have to offer. And don’t embarrass our high-school students like this. They have enough being thrown at them, between the death lettuce and resurgent measles. The last thing they need is the Patriot Games too.