The bidding process to host the 2024 Summer Olympics is turning out to be a lonely affair. With Budapest pulling out of the competition in February, citing disapproval from Hungarian citizens, only Los Angeles and Paris are left in the running.

There’s a certain irony to this endgame: the two remaining host countries have a President, in one case, and a strong Presidential candidate, in the other, who for many symbolize the opposite of global friendship. Donald Trump made the notions of "America First" and closing the borders themes of his Inauguration address. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, has opposed her country’s membership in the European Union. (The French Presidential election begins on April 23rd.) Like Trump, Le Pen has expressed a desire to curb immigration and return her country to its nationalist roots. Both use pugnacious language that’s far from the flowery, idealistic prose favored by the Olympic movement.

That these countries are the last ones standing is not surprising given the lack of competition. So anemic is the host-city bidding process that leaders of the International Olympic Committee met last month, in South Korea, to establish a panel to examine rewriting the Olympic charter and award a 2024-2028 double bid to Los Angeles and Paris, partially, people familiar with the process said, to spare the I.O.C. the humiliation of another lackluster round of bidding. Only two cities stepped up to host the 2022 Winter Games—Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. (Snowless Beijing won, and will spend nearly ninety million dollars on “water-diversion schemes,” according to the Economist.)

There are good reasons for not wanting to host the Olympics. The Games can be costly and, in spite of their patriotic overtones, can unintentionally expose a nation’s weaknesses to the world. In Athens, which hosted the Olympics in 2004, venues are now in ruins. A similar scene of rust, cobwebs, and decay can be found in Beijing, remnants of the 2008 Games. Human-rights organizations have accused several host nations of mistreating migrant laborers or displacing locals. A year before hosting the 2014 Sochi Games, Russia passed a law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” creating safety concerns for L.G.B.T. athletes and fans. In Rio, which hosted the Games last summer, favelas were emptied before the opening ceremony, but organizers promised that venues would have a positive, lasting impact for the community. Yet, a little more than six months later, pools are filled with scum, and abandoned arenas have been ransacked by vandals.

The stakes for the U.S. winning and staging a successful Olympic Games feel particularly high. Americans have not hosted the Olympics since 2002, when the Winter Games were held in Salt Lake City. (The last American Summer Olympics was held in Atlanta, in 1996.) A bid to host the 2016 Summer Games in Chicago suffered a humiliating defeat. U.S. Olympic officials have recently been successful in repairing relationships with I.O.C. members, largely due to a new agreement regarding revenue sharing for broadcast rights.

But Trump’s policies have created new tension: Will the already staggering logistics of bringing some eleven thousand athletes from more than two hundred countries to American soil be complicated by Trump’s (still unenforceable) executive order barring citizens from some Muslim-majority countries? The I.O.C.’s host-city contract requires all athletes be allowed in the country for the duration of the Games, regardless of what host leaders may think.

Trying to understand the psyche of I.O.C. voters is akin to getting inside a papal conclave: there are no exit polls or public discussions, and voting takes place behind closed doors. Much of the electorate is made up of European men, with a few sheikhs and royal-family members—an élite set that is far less likely to be interested in the implications of Trump’s Presidency than many of the citizens he governs. It’s also possible that Trump may not be in office by the time the Games are set to be hosted.

In a February radio interview with Westwood One, Trump endorsed the L.A. Olympic Games. (It probably doesn’t hurt that golf, a Trump pastime and area of investment, entered the Olympic program in Rio, last year.) “I would love to see the Olympics go to Los Angeles,” Trump said. “I think that it’ll be terrific. The United States committee’s members have asked me to speak up about it, and I have, and I think I’ve helped them, and let’s see what happens. But I’d be very happy and honored if they would choose Los Angeles, and we’d stand behind it.” (Meanwhile, organizers of the Paris bid have hedged their bets and befriended all the candidates leading in the polls.)

One option to avoid the bloat and costs of the Games, the Olympic historian Bill Mallon said, would be to adopt a model similar to that used by the British Open golf tournament, which rotates between a predetermined set of host venues. Paris and Los Angeles could be the start of a similar tradition with the Games, and the practice would be particularly beneficial for the Winter Games, which are costly and involve unusual infrastructure, like ski jumps and bobsled tracks.

“The Games have gotten so big and expensive,” Mallon said. “If you rotate who hosts, you don’t have to go on a building spree and spend all that money. Part of the problem has been the Olympic hosts were in an arms race.”

That arms race may have started with the 1984 Olympics Games, in Los Angeles. Montreal was still shouldering a massive debt of 1.6 billion Canadian dollars from hosting in 1976, and only two major cities expressed real interest: Los Angeles and Tehran. Tehran pulled out, citing political tumult within Iran, leaving Los Angeles, which was christened the host city by the I.O.C. by default. But, unlike Montreal, Los Angeles came out well. The city already had many of the necessary venues in place, and the few that needed to be built were repurposed after the Games. The city came out in the black, establishing the idea that there was money to be made by hosting the Olympics.

As part of its longer-term financial commitment to Californians, the committee behind the 1984 Games created a foundation that funded youth-sports endeavors in the area well after the closing ceremony. That legacy is believed to have included the building of tennis courts for children in Compton, where two young girls, Venus and Serena Williams, first learned to play.