Family fears Trump admin rigged kids trivia game show

The three finalists meet with President Donald Trump alongside Education Secretary Linda McMahon and contest host Mario Lopez in the Oval Office. Molly Riley/Official White House Photo

As part of President Donald Trump's 250th celebrations, the Department of Education held a game show about American citizenship. Aangad Singh's family is concerned it may have been rigged.

NOTUS reported that there appeared to be some creative counting of answers during a show that depended on points, but had no scoreboard.

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Singh's mother, Ramandeep.

“They just made this whole thing for show,” his uncle said. “They know who they want to win.”

As the family left the event, other parents of kids on the game show stopped them, saying how "shocked" they were. One boy stopped her and said that a group of contestants kept their own scores.

"We thought he won," the boy said, according to the report.

Even the young blond teen who won couldn't look him in the eye. She was a homeschooled student from Wyoming.

“That was insane,” she confessed. “You clearly knew everything.”

“What did she say?” Singh's father asked.

“That I should have won,” the boy reiterated.

That's when his mother approached the Department of Education official to ask for the final scores. They refused to hand them over, claiming they were "proprietary."

“How did they count the numbers?” she said. “That’s something we need to understand.”

So, they waited until the show was broadcast and watched, doing their own scorekeeping. His father was ready, with a spreadsheet titled “1776_Broadcast_Audit" open on his laptop.

"Aangad’s parents didn’t want to accuse anyone of fixing the competition," the NOTUS report said. "But they felt compelled to ask questions because their son never would."

Not only was there no scoreboard during the competition, but the show also never put the scores on the screen.

In the third round, the question had multiple answers; each contestant received the full 20 points. When it came to Singh's turn the question was, “According to Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution, in which cases do the federal courts have jurisdiction?” He had to list all four answers for full credit.

He did it, yet the graphic on the screen counted two of the correct answers as wrong.

“Maritime jurisdiction.” Correct.

“Parties of state and citizens of another state," was marked incorrect.

“What?” Aangad said on the couch, his voice sharp.

He got two more correct, then another wrong: “Case with state and foreign nation.”

“What?” Singh's said.

He pulled out his phone to look up the Constitution. Sure enough, it said the phrases “between a State and Citizens of another State” and “between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.”

The final was a lightning round. They asked the amendment that ended slavery, and Singh answered the 13th. They counted it wrong. The screen displayed the correct answer. Singh exclaimed that was what he said.

His only conclusion was that they thought he said fourteenth. While they were watching on television, however, the auto-generated captions also captured his answer as "thirteenth."

The family is split between those who think the judges were simply incompetent and those who believe something more nefarious was afoot. Singh's uncle wants an investigation.

“I personally think that they just had faulty sources,” Singh said.

The judges were all teachers who received the James Madison Memorial Fellowship to study the Constitution. The only thing Singh could think is that they graded things incorrectly. The report said "it seemed likely to him that they hadn’t memorized Article 3 as well as he had. Or maybe his answers didn’t match the phrasing on their rubrics."

“That shows ineptness,” Singh said.

They tried to decide if they should press things with the Department of Education. Singh's mother didn't think that they could afford such a fight.

NOTUS reporter Sam Fortier was invited by the Department of Education to follow Singh through the competition. "Now, their predicament felt like a window into something bigger: If the government or the courts couldn’t bring them justice, then maybe, they thought, the media could," he wrote.

"All I could do was write what happened. But the Fourth Estate was another institution at low ebbs in trust and influence, and [Singh's father] knew it. He doubted the government would bow to media pressure," said Fortier.

In the end, they reached out to a lawyer, asking for an objective eye to calculate the answers and the scores to see whether Singh was supposed to be in the top three.

The family moved on, the reporter said, "He didn’t see Miriam, the girl from Wyoming, tell her local newspaper that she was surprised by who made the top three. He didn’t see the Education Department use Miriam’s homeschooling as a cudgel in the culture war."

His father messaged the Department of Education, but never got a response.

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