Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, April 1, 2025. It is of course April Fools’ Day, but I won’t pull any stunts here. Below you see the April page, showing the Château de Dourdan, from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in history (1412-1415). It’s Spring!
It’s also National Atheist’s Day (but which atheist?), National Sourdough Bread Day, International Fun at Work Day, National Soylent Green Day (it’s PEOPLE!), National Trombone Players Day, National One Cent Day (is Trump going to outlaw pennies?) and Boomer Bonus Day, explained this way:
Gaye Anderson of Merrillville, Indiana, noticed that as she and her friends aged, they were talking more about their health and how they felt like pieces of themselves were falling apart. Anderson expressed, “the last thing we wanted to do was keep going to lots of birthday parties and reminding ourselves how we kept getting older each year.” So, she came up with Boomer Bonus Day, a holiday to celebrate each year without the baggage of turning another year older. It was a way to celebrate without adding any years. April 1—the same date as April Fools’ Day—was chosen for the holiday “because the whole thing gets to be a joke: the body goes—but the mind still thinks it’s 21!”
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 1 Wikipedia page. Here’s
Da Nooz:
*According to the NYT, the Trump Administration is betting that consumers will swallow the new tariffs and not be overly bothered by rising prices (article archived here).
President Trump’s sweeping tariffs are expected to raise the cost of cars, electronics, metals, lumber, pharmaceuticals and other products that American consumers and businesses buy from overseas.
But Mr. Trump and his advisers are betting that it can sell an inflation-weary public on a provocative idea: Cheap stuff is not the American dream.
“I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American-made cars,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s Meet the Press show on Sunday in response to fears of foreign car prices spiking.
The notion that there is more to life than low-cost imports is an acknowledgment that tariffs could impose additional costs on Americans. It is also a pitch that the burden will be worth it. Mr. Trump’s ability to convince consumers that it is acceptable to pay more to support domestic manufacturing and adhere to his “America First” agenda could determine whether the president’s second term is a success or a calamity.
But it is not an easy sell. The onslaught of tariffs has roiled markets and dampened consumer confidence. Auto tariffs that go into effect on Thursday will add a 25 percent tax on imports of cars and car parts, likely upending pricing in the sector. Mr. Trump has already imposed tariffs of 20 percent on Chinese goods and more are expected later this week, when the president announces his “reciprocal” tariffs on major trading partners, including those in Asia and Europe.
In confronting anxiety over the trade uncertainty, Mr. Trump and his top economic aides have resorted to asking Americans to think about the bigger picture. They espouse the view that Mr. Trump’s trade wars are necessary to correct decades of economic injustice and that paying a bit more should be a matter of national pride.
“We may have, short term, a little pain,” Mr. Trump said last month as he unveiled tariffs on Canada and Mexico. “People understand that.”
*In the Harvard Crimson, computer science professor Boaz Barak tells us, “To protect America’s universities, we need America’s public.” He claims there are three ways universities must reassure the public:
From investigations, funding cuts, to detaining students, the Trump administration is making good on Vice President J.D. Vance’s words that “universities are the enemy.”
The question is what universities should do about it.
While universities should defend themselves in the courts, in the long term, a successful case for the continued support of American universities will need to convince Republican policymakers, as well as the general public, of the following three points. First, American Universities are the engine of American prosperity. Second, Universities are not partisan actors. Third, Universities can police themselves.
Of course, to make this case, we also have to ensure that all three points are true.
The first point is an easy one to make. A recent viral tweet from University of California, Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel asserted that students and postdocs from his lab alone — largely funded by Federal grants — co-founded 12 companies with a combined market value of hundreds of billions of dollars. Economists Andrew Fieldhouse and Karel Mertens estimated that government-funded research and development accounted for about 20 percent of private sector productivity growth post World War II.
. . .The second point — that universities are not partisan actors — is more complicated. Over the last decade, the confidence of the American public, especially Republicans, in higher education has radically declined. It is no accident that the partisan skew of faculty nationwide grew in the same period. According to a Crimson survey, under 1.5 percent of surveyed Harvard faculty identify as conservative.
Universities must do better in their efforts to cultivate viewpoint diversity, from the faculty we hire and the speakers we invite to the content of our courses.
Yet, the perception that elite universities are some kind of Marxist indoctrination camp is widely off the mark.
Universities should assure the public and policymakers that their campuses are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Toward this end, we should not let the tail wag the dog and allow the actions of marginal programs to tarnish the name of the whole institution. If some programs or faculty are more focused on activism than scholarship, then perhaps the place for them is not a university but a non-profit organization.
Here’s one important to me:
Regarding the third point, the federal government has a legitimate say in how universities are managed, as per Title IX and Title VI of the Educational Amendments and Civil Rights Acts. These have been used before by administrations to force policy changes on universities, including the 2011 Dear Colleague letter of the Obama administration.
. . . . Universities should demonstrate that they can set and enforce clear time, place, and manner restrictions that enable students to express their positions without allowing them to disrupt university activities. If students feel they cannot make their point without causing disruptions, they should be prepared to face the consequences.
Amen. “Universities can police themselves.” Hardly any of them are actually able to do this. And without that, chaos reigns and people get away with all kinds of stuff the public dislikes–and can’t understand why is persistence. So it goes.
*Bad news for cat lovers: bird flu is starting to show up in moggies. (h/t Barry):
According to the U.S. Agriculture Department, 126 domestic cats in the U.S. have been infected with bird flu since 2022. Around half of those cases were recorded this year, and many were exposed through food or milk.
“We see continued reports of cats with bird flu infection from across the country, and it’s kept increasing in the past months,” said Suresh Kuchipudi, professor of infectious diseases and microbiology at University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.
In cats, bird flu tends to be swift and lethal. Although the overall risk to indoor cats is low, Kuchipudi and other experts who study or diagnose the infections say the threat is mounting. With bird flu spreading rampantly among poultry and cattle, there is a constant opportunity for the virus to enter the raw food supply. And while there’s no evidence yet that cats can transmit bird flu to people, the potential increases as more cats get sick.
. . .Most pet food is heated to a high enough temperature to kill pathogens before it’s packaged, but bird flu can linger in raw food if it’s sourced from infected poultry — for instance, from chickens that were culled due to an outbreak.
“The animals that were depopulated could potentially have ended up in the food chain for pets,” said Laura Goodman, an assistant professor at Cornell University’s Baker Institute for Animal Health. “It’s not uncommon for substandard meat to end up in the pet food chain.”
In the last four months, at least three pet food manufacturers have recalled batches containing raw poultry. The Food and Drug Administration in January warned manufacturers using uncooked meat to reassess their food safety plans in light of the recent cat illnesses and deaths.
Other cats have been exposed to bird flu on dairy farms, likely from drinking raw milk from infected cows. And in some instances, outdoor cats have picked up the virus directly from dead birds.
The lesson: do NOT feed your cat commercial cat food made with raw meat, or give them raw milk. Although cats don’t lay eggs, we don’t want them dying en masse. Fortunately, I don’t think it’s easily transmitted from one cat to another, at least indoors.
*If there’s anything I’m willing to bet substantial money on, it’s that Trump will not be a Republican candidate for President in 3.5 years. It’s arrantly unconstitutional, and I am not so far gone that I think he’s going to use the U.S. military to force him either running or even cancelling the election. And the Supreme Court will not have it, conservative as they are. Yet some people are still wailing about this.
Constitutional scholars say any third run for the presidency would violate both the spirit and the letter of the amendment, which was passed after World War II as a protection against “elective monarchy.” Here’s what to know.
What does the 22nd Amendment say? [for crying out loud, are we stupid?]
The 22nd Amendment explicitly prohibits any president from seeking more than two terms, either in consecutive or nonconsecutive sequence. It states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
Trump has twice been elected to the presidential office, in 2016 and 2024.
The amendment was passed by Congress in 1947 and became part of the Constitution in 1951, when it was fully ratified by the states.
In interaction with the 12th Amendment, which was ratified in 1804, the 22nd Amendment also has potential legal implications for who can seek the office of vice president. According to the 12th Amendment, “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President.”
How could Trump seek a third term?
The most legally straightforward way to avoid the 22nd Amendment’s limitations would be to repeal it, a painstaking and likely lengthy process that would require the passage of another amendment. Proposed amendments must be passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, then ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states.
Despite thousands of proposed changes, the states have repealed an amendment only once — the 18th, which established Prohibition.
Ain’t gonna happen. If you think otherwise, email me and we’ll make an official bet! I’m sure nobody will be willing to bet me! What we have to worry about is not Trump running again, but Vance running in 2028. And that will happen if the Democrats don’t up their game.
*The Times of Israel reports that Iran is threatening the U.S. if Trump continues to grumble about it and make threats about bombing it:
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Monday the US would receive a strong blow if it acts on President Donald Trump’s threat to bomb unless Tehran reaches a new nuclear deal with Washington.
Trump reiterated his threat on Sunday that Iran would be bombed if it does not accept his offer for talks outlined in a letter sent to Iran’s leadership in early March, giving Tehran a two-month window to make a decision.
Switzerland’s ambassador, who represents US interests and acts as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran, was summoned on Monday by the Iranian foreign ministry, which expressed Tehran’s determination to respond “decisively and immediately” to any threat.
And how, exactly, are they going to do that? They don’t have the bomb yet (though they will if somebody doesn’t prevent them), and Iran’s attempt to destroy Israel with missiles was a miserable failure.
“The enmity from the US and Israel has always been there. They threaten to attack us, which we don’t think is very probable, but if they commit any mischief they will surely receive a strong reciprocal blow,” Khamenei said.
“And if they are thinking of causing sedition inside the country as in past years, the Iranian people themselves will deal with them,” he added.
Iranian authorities blame the West for the recent unrest, including 2022-2023 protests over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained for allegedly flouting hijab rules, and nationwide protests in 2019 over fuel price rises.
On Monday, regime mouthpiece The Tehran Times reported that the Iranian military had “readied missiles with the capability to strike US-related positions” amid the threats and noted that some of these missiles were in underground facilities built to withstand airstrikes.
These are idle threats. But they won’t be when Iran gets nukes, which it surely will. That’s why it’s important to prevent them one way or the other (and, so far, negotiations haven’t worked). Finally, the uprisings over the death of the Mahsa Amini were due to the Iranian people—particularly the women—getting fed up with the theocracy. Westerners, including feminists, aren’t particularly concerned with what’s going on in Iran, and the regime has only itself to blame for inciting protests by erasing women’s rights.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pulling Andrzej’s chain:
Hili: Are you using artificial intelligence?A: No, I’m still using my own.Hili: Be careful, young people will laugh at you.
Hili: Czy korzystasz z sztucznej inteligencji?Ja: Nie, nadal używam naturalnej.Hili: Uważaj, bo młodzi ludzie będą się z ciebie śmiali.
*******************
One in my honor from reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe, who adds “(that’s an Israeli time machine in the background…) “. The cartoon is called “Time Travels,” and click it to enlarge:
From I Love Cats:
From Things With Faces: a carton of eggs that’s grim, as well it should be!
From Masih, yet another Iranian women blinded for political protesting. She has a GoFundMe site:
Mersedeh needs our help. She’s fighting for her vision and stability after enduring so much. Please consider donating and sharing her story. Every little bit counts. https://t.co/4TPvOkW72x
Please share my Gofoundme 🙏🏾
— MersedeH_eye (@mersedeh_eye) March 26, 2025
I may have posted this before, but it’s an animal-rescue story with a happy ending. From Jez:
“So I’m driving down the road this morning and the cars in front of me are driving over a black thing in the road. It’s going between their tires so I’m guessing it’s a box. It’s a kitten just sitting upright shaking like a leaf. And some asshole had spread glue on its paws and… pic.twitter.com/b4bJXkHSbY
— 𝕏 Dogs (@_XDogs) January 14, 2025
From Malcolm; a cat is freaked out by seeing a faux dinosaur (well, a descendant of a real one):
Appropriate reaction upon seeing a dinosaur pic.twitter.com/Ruansfta0h
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) March 23, 2025
Two from my feed. First, a playful pachyderm:
Kids are kids in every living creature. pic.twitter.com/gerYXlCkJq
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) March 30, 2025
. . . and a chonky bumblebee:
What an absolute unit of a bumblebee pic.twitter.com/3Pq1P9XnRZ
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) March 30, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted.
This Belgian Jewish boy was gassed to death (undoubtedly with his mother) upon arriving at Auschwitz. Had he not died, he would be 86 years old today. But he was three when they killed him.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-01T10:22:13.136Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a fisher (Pekania pennanti), a north American mustelid):
OTD '22: Daytime fisher capture. #trailcam 🦊
— Chris Whittier (@chriswhittier.bsky.social) 2025-03-29T19:37:10.436Z
Lovely tracking footage:
HUGE IN FLIGHT BIRD FOOTAGE VICTORY: Belted kingfisher in close proximity(under 50 feet!), in flight, AND video of it sticking the landing.You don't get much better than this! #birds
— Brett "Solidarity 2025" Banditelli (@banditelli.org) 2025-03-11T03:06:48.731Z
Here’s a funny comic :
D*g : “WATCH WHAT I CAN MAKE PAVLOV DO.
AS SOON AS I DROOL, HE’LL SMILE AND WRITE IN HIS LITTLE BOOK.”
x.com/miniapeur/status/1906396854524190919?s=46
Great cartoon!
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it. -Milan Kundera, novelist, playwright, and poet (1 Apr 1929-2023)
The way a government treats refugees is very instructive because it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.
— British Labour politician Tony Benn (1925-2014)
[ Neanderthals, other early hominins unavailable for comment. ]
Trump third term: ticket is Vance for President, Trump for VP. After election Vance steps down and Trump becomes President. But he was not elected President.
Trump apparently has a bunch of people thinking up ways to do things like this to get around the constitution.
But it won’t work, according to the 12th amendment.
That’s right. The final line of the 12th;
“But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
But Trump as VP would be constitutionally eligible for the office of President because his only route to ascending to that office would not require him to be thrice elected to it. The VP need only be over 35, a naturally born U.S. citizen, a resident of the U.S. for seven years, and not guilty of insurrection. President Trump meets all those criteria.
I think the main objection is political: Trump would have to trust that Vance would indeed step down, blowing his own political career, instead of discovering he quite liked being President, thank you very much, and doing everything he could to secure re-election to his own second term, leaving Trump fuming and scheming in the U.S. Naval Observatory.
Not necessarily a problem. Vance could plausibly arrange a palace coup via section 4 of the 25th amendment. (This also is not a joke.)
He will be constitutionally ineligible to be President, and therefore ineligible to be VP in the first place.
Pure fantasy. Trump would never accepts a VP slot, even temporarily. The other problem is winning. A Vance/Trump ticket would alienate a lot of voters. A closely related point is that Trump would just be too old. After the “we finally beat Medicare” debacle the public is very sensitive to age.
Russia/Putin did pretty much what you describe with Medvedev in … maybe 2008-ish. Worked there just fine but WE are not Russia thank goodness.
Trump will probably be obviously to the viewer (as in Biden) not up to the task, age wise.
So J.D will run and Trump will just tweet from Mar a Largo.
J.D will WIN unless the left stops its “raaacism”/DEI fetish, stops sexually mutilating autistic teens, and eases back on the simping for Islamic terrorists.
It’ll be grand.
D.A.
NYC
Vance 2028 may or may not win. A lot will depend on who he runs against. Against AOC, he will probably win. Against Kamala (who I doubt will run) he will probably win. Against other Democrats? The outcome is far from obvious.
The Democrats will have a hard time running on the “Vance is a dictator in waiting” line if they simultaneously argue that he would voluntarily cede the presidency to Trump. Whatever “scary” narrative they might concoct, I have no doubt they will do so as it will be much easier than fixing the problems that plague the party.
Love today’s Pliny the in Between memorializing Jerry’s often used phrase. Do not recognize the script: doesn’t look like lower case hebrew, nor greek…is it meaningful or just gibberish?
It’s the ancient Hebrew or palaeo-Hebrew alphabet. What we generally think of as the Hebrew alphabet is in fact a late derivation from the Aramaic.
Thanks! Wow. I figured that someone would know.
+1 If that was the 10th commandment, I might become an orthodox Jew. That would be the only commandment that holds water.
Having purchased two vehicles in the last four years—and having done so after hundreds of hours of leisurely research and hands-on inspections—I can say that there are three reasons why I wouldn’t buy an American car if not in the market for a pickup truck: safety, reliability, and durability. And then you have the fact that even the supposedly upscale brands fill their cars with cheap trinkets from their lower-priced corporate siblings. America will sell more cars (and appliances) when it makes better products. In a tariffed world, the quality will further decline.
Yes, the universities should police themselves. If right-wing agitators were disrupting their operations, they would quickly find the competence to do so.
After owning 5 Hondas in a row, I have found my now 13-yr.-old Ford Escape to be just as good. My pre-Honda Dodge Omni was a disaster.
My dad had Dodge Omni in 1980/1981 I think it was. His next car was a Honda.
That’s about when I had my Omni. It was apparently motor trend car of the year or something. I had a wonderful Opel when I moved to Canada, but Canada did not service them (only the sportscars) so when I had brake problems I gave up on going across the border to get it serviced and bought the terrible Omni. It backfired whenever I went through a puddle. My dad put a baggie with a rubber band over the distributor cap to help – sort of. My ex drove it to take his medical boards and I think it stalled a couple of times on the way and this was a one-year-old car. All my Hondas and my Ford Escape have been very good cars.
The chicken tax may have influenced your truck decision.
The only theory that I have heard that might work for a third term is if the contextualists on SCOTUS rule that the 22 Amendment only applies to 2 consecutive elections since it was passed in response to FDRs 4 consecutive elections. The SCOTUS likes to make things up. Presidential immunity for example. It would not surprise me to see them do it again.
Maybe his angle will be the fact that he lost the popular vote the first time around.
Or he might claim he “won” the 2020 election so is currently on his third term.
It’s either a “gotcha” or “the rule’s already broken so we must throw it out.”
Nah. That wouldn’t fly. The popular vote is irrelevant to the outcome of the election, not mentioned anywhere in election law (afaik), tallied for entertainment value only, and used as a shovel by partisans to undermine the legitimacy of GOP Presidents, endowing The Resistance with moral certainty.
Donald Trump has been elected twice to the Presidency. Case closed. He can become President again only by ascending from VP through the usual Constitutional processes.
Besides, even if he claimed he was not elected in 2016, he still served a full four-year term. This made him eligible to be elected only one more time, which he was in 2024.
I suspect the 12th amendment would prevent the “VP” scenario unless the courts rule that the term elected in the 22nd only applies to two consecutive elections. In which case he may as well run for president since the 22nd would not prevent him from doing so (if the courts so hold).
I’ve also heard the idea that Vance runs with Trump as V.P.; once Vance wins (big IF, but who knows with Musk’s finagling) he relinquishes the Presidency and viola! I doubt the fever dream will go away easily. Just like taking Greenland and making Canada state 51.
But my true suspicion is this is just another shiny object to keep Americans from noticing the economy is moving towards the shitter and other “don’t look here” antics.
Edit: I see someone already mentioned this upthread. For some reason, I read from the bottom up…
On universities losing confidence of the American public: Where to start? Dr. Coyne and other university level contributors to this blog have done an excellent job chronicling how academia has lost its way. No need to go over that ground.
However, if I were king, I would start reform at the colleges of education because they have done real damage to our country. Their output has been teachers who can’t teach. The overall performance of American students is mediocre at best and no doubt university educators of this blog have been disappointed at the lack of academic preparation and rigor of public-school students entering their classroom. IMHO, the low level of academic output of American students is because educators revel in being social workers…not teachers. Look at Harvard’s…or any college of education’s podcast…and listen to a few if you can. Very little subject matter on teaching.
Can educators lead reform and win back the public’s trust? No. I have been involved in major professional turnarounds, and my experience is those responsible for the mess aren’t willing to clean it up. For 10 years, I had a side hustle writing a newspaper column in a state capital. At a speaking engagement, I was asked what was most surprising lesson learned while writing the column. It was the most highly educated sector of our society – educators – were the most resistant to change, outcome measurement and accountability.
Those lessons were reinforced during seven years as a trustee at a small, private liberal arts university in a purple swing state.
What responsibility and accountability do students themselves have for their education? We most reasonably don’t expect much of kindergartners but we most reasonably do high schoolers (the ululating about insufficient prefrontal cortex development notwithstanding).
Are the wrong sort of people going into public K-12 education? If, so who are the right sort of people? Do university professors (and graduate TA’s) undergo some sort of extensive pedagogical best practices regimen? (Perhaps they should given the ongoing juvenilizing of higher education. Re: Bill Maher http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMF0bser1aM)
I’d like to see how any Ph.D. from any major or a corporate CEO persuades a high school male child to simply enter the classroom and be seated ready to learn when the bell rings instead of running the halls and dashing into the room at the last moment and then for most of the period interrupt and disrupt. He can’t be “fired.”
“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach teachers.”
I submit Jo Boaler of Stanford’s Graduate Education School as Exhibit 1.
https://stanfordreview.org/jo-boalers-math-ish-is-more-ish-than-math/
https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-two-front-war-on-academic-standards
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/california-needs-real-math-education
https://www.educationnext.org/san-franciscos-detracking-experiment/
Let’s see if this works…
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-average-college-student-is-illiterate?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=61579&post_id=160242052&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=gl3au&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
In my midwit opinion – I totally agree Rick: I think Colleges of Ed are the vectors of woke. More than anything.
They’re deeply left, communist even and they take the lowest intellectual slice of the pie, applicant wise, who are primed to become culture warrior/activists.
This flies in the face of the MANY teachers, even at primary school, who are the best among us. And what really successful person can’t point to some teacher or other who started them on the way to success?
So… there’s a lot of variance in quality in teaching, but the “Skools of Ed” politically empower the left side of the bell curve.
best regards, Rick,
D.A.
NYC
Iran’s hissing and cursing is beyond parody. Here is an 87 year old religious fool waving his shaky fist against the sky threatening all hell to rain down on the damn Joos and accursed Great Satan. HA! Color me terrified!
He’s dictator of a country that actually can’t even keep the lights on, can’t handle differential rainfall patterns, has no air defense… (…anymore, ahem, thx Israel!), whose allies and proxies were spectacularly castrated by Mossad genius…. and whose air force comprise of rusting matchbox toys left over since the Disco Era.
Against a regional and global superpower/s and the ire of all his neighbors.
Their currency is worth less than animal fertilizer in financial markets, investments untouchable there and their passports next to useless. Their youth HATE them and they murder their young women for dress code violations.
What unserious clowns these people are.
Onwards Israeli heroes.
D.A.
NYC
Excellent post for the cruelest day.
I worry about the tariffs. They are inflationary. They risk upending the entire global economy. Markets hate uncertainty. We don’t need another financial crisis.
Re the kingfisher flight video, I had no idea that there were auto-tracking cameras. Or maybe the apparent stability was done in post-production ?
If anyone ends up taking the bet with our host, I’m also happy to get in on the action! No way Trump is running, but he sure got people talking. I’m sure he really believes his own BS as well, but he won’t run.
2028 looks like a race around the drain with no good D candidates and the R administration doing their darndest to screw up the economy. I can’t see any viable 3rd party candidate running; I would have been intrigued by a Justin Amash LP run last year, but he’s too far distanced from politics now to be a candidate in 2028. Plus the Libertarians by their very nature can’t build a coalition within their own party so they’ll never be able to be in the running – it’s hard to be a “party” when your primary message is individualism!