President Donald Trump announced on Thursday a slate of events for the 250th birthday of the United States. Among them is a “four-day athletic event” featuring high schoolers from each state and territory competing.
He’s calling this event the “Patriot Games.”
Trump touted “the first-ever Patriot Games, an unprecedented four-day athletic event featuring the greatest high school athletes — one young man and one young woman from each state and territory,” and made an additional dig at transgender youth athletes by adding, “But I promise there will be no men playing in women’s sports.”
And if you, like so much of the world, are familiar with a more extreme version of this premise, it might just mean you were alive and breathing between the years of 2008 and 2023 and caught wind of the “Hunger Games” franchise by Suzanne Collins.
As a refresher, the hit books and movies follow the story of young people living in a high-control, police state (formerly North America) forced to compete in a televised fight to the death each year as a punishment for a previous rebellion — incentivized further to enter with the chance to provide for their families and communities, already starved by the state.
