The premise sounds almost fictional: one boy and one girl from every state, territory and some tribal nations, flown to a private campus in Ohio to compete in a televised athletic contest called the Patriot Games — a Trump-backed youth competition with obstacle courses, patriotic testimonials and inevitable comparisons to The Hunger Games.
Except unlike the dystopian book and movie franchise where kids are pitted in a televised battle of survival, the stakes in the Patriot Games won’t be life and death. The male and female winners will each receive $125,000 in college scholarship money.
For 16-year-old Tylee Herrmann, the pitch was simple. In her video application, she gave her age, her school in Arizona and her reason for wanting to compete: she wanted to help “bring patriotism back to the US.”
“I feel like a lot of times right now, we feel disunified,” Herrmann, the Cherokee Nation representative, said in an interview with CNN. “I think we need something to bring us all together, because we’re the United States of America, and we need to be a little more united.”
However, Herrmann says she’s already experiencing how controversial the Patriot Games can be.
