Recently, 42 athletes from 24 countries gathered in a temporary, ad hoc stadium built in a casino overflow parking lot to compete in what Donald Trump Jr. called an example of “excellence, innovation and American dominance on the world stage.”
The six-hour event featured “enhanced” athletes — individuals who had taken performance-enhancing supplements and/or were using gear banned in traditional sport — competing in swimming, track and weightlifting events.
They were cheered on by a small audience of about 2,500 invite-only spectators, comprised of family and friends of the athletes, Enhanced business partners, and social media influencers. The event streamed live for free in North America on the Roku Channel and also was featured across Enhanced’s YouTube, Rumble, Twitch and Kick accounts.
The Games promised a revolution in sports where world records would fall and human ability would be pushed to superhuman lengths. Technology and pharmacology would combine with peak human physicality to eradicate the boundaries of athletic accomplishments.
While not explicitly mentioned, the specter of tech-bro transhumanism lingered over the event, as the Games promised to lead humanity into a new era. Enhanced CEO Maximilian Martin promised, “With the power of enhancements we can prove we are the best we can ever think of.”
The primary bankroller and co-lead of the Games was 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm formed after a meeting of JD Vance’s conservative donor group Rockbridge Network identified a need to build a conservative-backed investment firm. 1789 Capital focuses on products and companies associated with MAGA-aligned values and has used their political connections. Run in part by Donald Trump Jr., the firm has utilized their political connections to, in the words of Business Insider, “monetize MAGA.”
The Games themselves were an extension of this philosophy — a MAGA-fication of athletics presented in the form of a glorified steroid-addled exhibition match that relied on MAGA-aligned funding, justified itself using RFK Jr.’s personal steroid use and used clips of a Trump speech in promotional videos. Make no mistake, the Enhanced Games were indelibly and thoroughly MAGA. And by evaluating these Games we can some insight into the power structures underlying the entire MAGA framework.
Canadian weightlifter Boady Santavy gestures from the floor as he competes during the deadlift event at the Enhanced Games at Resorts World in Las Vegas,on May 24, 2026.. (Photo by Etienne LAURENT / AFP via Getty Images)
The rhetoric of success and reality of failure
The best way to judge the Enhanced Games is whether or not the event lived up to its own hype. It’s impossible to highlight how revolutionary the Games’ founders set their event up to be. They offered $1 million for every world record broken during the event and even hyped the possibility that two of the most famous records in track and field could fall.
Reality was much different.
While Usain Bolt holds the men’s world record in the 100 meters at 9.58 seconds, Enhanced Games winner Fred Kerley crossed the finish line in a comparatively slow 9.97 — a time good enough for only fifth among U.S. high school athletes. Florence Griffith Joyner holds the women’s 100-meter record at 10.49. Enhanced Games winner Tristan Evelyn clocked in at 11.26, more than three-quarters of a second slower. And the kicker? Kerley and Evelyn competed absolutely unenhanced. Their juiced competitors were even slower.
The Games promised never-before-seen speed, power and athletic ability. Instead, it mostly gave viewers anemic performances that would not have qualified for an Olympics.
Cody Miller, winner of the men’s 100m breaststroke, finished with a time that would have placed seventh at the 2024 Olympics, calling his performance “shit” in a post-race interview. In the deadlift, Hafþór “Thor” Björnsson — best known for playing “The Mountain” in Game of Thrones — failed to break his own 510kg world record set just eight months ago. When Canadian weightlifter Boady Santavy failed at his world record snatch attempt, the Games ripped up their own rulebook to allow him another attempt, which also failed.
“This gap between rhetoric and reality has been a defining characteristic of the MAGA movement and Trumpian politics.”
This gap between rhetoric and reality has been a defining characteristic of the MAGA movement and Trumpian politics. Grand promises with a failure to deliver are nothing new in politics, but Trump has taken the art to an extreme, often delivering the opposite of what was promised.
A central claim of his first administration was that he’d build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. Not only did they not pay for it, very little was actually built with some parts immediately collapsing due to wind.
Key to his second campaign was lowering the cost of living, but instead the price of nearly everything has increased, fueled by reckless foreign policy.
And the list is literally endless — whether it’s the promise to keep America out of war while repeatedly escalating international conflicts or claiming his proposed White House ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building” before demolishing the entire East Wing.
It’s not just big, important things either. Trump and MAGA do this with everything. Hours after announcing the musical lineup for Freedom 250, multiple acts dropped out, saying they were either misled about the partisan nature of the event or never had agreed to the event.
Like the Enhanced Games, Trump and MAGA are big on hype and spectacle, but what they actually deliver is something completely different.
Max McCusker and Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson attend the Enhanced Games at Resorts World Las Vegas on May 24, 2026 . (Photo by Greg Doherty/Getty Images for Enhanced)
Distrusting the establishment
Similar to Trumpian rhetoric, the Enhanced Games framed themselves as an institutional disrupter. Organizers portrayed anti-doping agencies, Olympic governing bodies and sports federations as corrupt bureaucracies suppressing innovation and limiting human freedom.
Chris Buskirk, 1789 Capital’s co-founder called it an investment in a “freer, more competitive world.”
Omeed Malik, the venture capital’s other founder, called the Games “a declaration of freedom” saying, “We’ve let bureaucrats and corrupt institutions decide what’s ‘allowed’ in sports and what’s not. That era is over.”
Meanwhile, the Games’ founder, Aron D’Souza, portrayed the event in an explicitly political light, saying the Games’ pro-doping philosophy aligns with MAGA’s desire to “bring disruption and reform into the health care sector.”
“Distrust of established institutions has become a defining feature of MAGA and America as a whole.”
Distrust of established institutions has become a defining feature of MAGA and America as a whole. And while this pre-dates Trump by a long shot and isn’t always unfounded, MAGA mobilized and empowered a movement deeply suspicious of established authorities, promising to “drain the swamp” by evicting seasoned leaders and culling vast swaths of American bureaucracy. Over the course of Trump’s two presidential terms, particularly in this second term, MAGA has sought to dissolve or disempower much of the federal government while consolidating authority in Trump.
This distrust of experts has been particularly present within the health care sector, with a historical precedent in vaccine hesitancy that exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic. MAGA became synonymous with defying health and safety recommendations, pushing back against mask mandates and refusing COVID-19 vaccines while downplaying the severity or even denying the reality of the disease. Simultaneously, MAGA began to promote alternative treatments to COVID, most notably the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin.
Post-COVID, suspicion of established health care and medicine led to a steady increase in the use of dietary supplements and nutraceuticals, with various wellness products being touted by influential MAGA figures and conservative influencers. The Enhanced Games built on this institutional distrust, hoping to showcase how, when freed from the constraints of institutional caution and governmental oversight, humans could unleash a new level of health and potential.
But just as the MAHA movement is failing to make us healthier (and is actually making us sicker), the Enhanced Games failed to prove that their supplements and alternative drugs make anyone faster or stronger.
For the love of the grift
To many, the Enhanced Games ended up looking like a six-hour infomercial. Steve Magness, a high-performance coach who has authored books like Peak Performance and The Science of Running, called the Games a “sales funnel with a starting gun” intended to “sell drugs to the person feeling inadequate because their peak athletic moment came decades ago, back when they scored four touchdowns for Polk High.”
Indeed, if you go to Enhanced’s website, the homepage doesn’t contain any information about the Games and instead pitches visitors on how they, too, can “live enhanced.” The site claims to offer “personalized treatment and guided pathways built around your unique biology” and offers expensive subscriptions to a number of bespoke wellness products including testosterone injections and creams, GLP-1 weight loss options, copper peptides, to $74-per-month pouches of something just labelled “Longer.”
The Enhanced Games never were about sports achievement. By their own admission in their SEC filing, the Games are only “the brand and audience engine of the company” while the real goal of the company is to sell its telehealth and supplement subscriptions with a long-term goal of gathering genetic profiling data to create an “AI-powered platform capable of … generat(ing) bespoke, personalized protocols.”
“It’s a clever grift that’s only meant to enhance the pocketbooks and databanks of tech-bro billionaires.”
It’s a clever grift that’s only meant to enhance the pocketbooks and databanks of tech-bro billionaires.
That fusion of politics, spectacle and self-enrichment comes straight from Trump’s own personal playbook as he has leveraged his political authority to engage in open and obvious insider trading, shield his family and organization from IRS audits, promote a personally branded meme coin, and the list goes on and on. Trump has boosted his personal net worth by $3 billion in the last 18 months.
This dynamic isn’t unique to the Trump family. MAGA has built entire industries out of political loyalty, leading Jim Vorel to write: “For MAGA Americans, the only things more certain than death (possibly from measles) or taxes (effectively higher, thanks to Trump’s tariffs) is the inevitability of being taken advantage of by a vast constellation of grifters who have learned to exploit the country’s yawning partisan divide.”
The end result is a political culture where ideological commitment is frequently converted into economic opportunity for those at the top of the ecosystem. And this is what brought about the Enhanced Games.
The Games are a concentrated expression of the MAGA ethos — built through spectacle, justified through distrust, sustained through monetized grievance against institutional authority. They promised a vision of transcendent human performance but delivered a curated exhibition of mediocrity wrapped in marketing language.
One can only hope the Games’ abject failure will serve to be prophetic.
Since the end of the Games, Enhanced’s stock has plummeted, down 47.38% in the past five days after and down 61.85% since going public. Time will tell if the Games as a marketing strategy will lead to the direct mail sales Enhanced hopes for. Either way, there’s now an empty 50m swimming pool sitting in a Las Vegas casino parking lot serving as proof that the Games did not reveal a better, more powerful humanity but just how inhumane and dehumanizing the powerful among us have become.
Josh Olds
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.