By
Margaret Hartmann,
senior editor for Intelligencer who has worked at New York since 2012
Late last year, President Trump announced that America’s 250th birthday celebration would include 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.” Two winners would split $250,000 in scholarship money.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games were inevitable. From a structural standpoint, when you have two kids from each region competing in a nationally televised game, it’s going to remind people of the hit book and film franchise. And that goes double when the event is hosted by an authoritarian-leaning regime.
