Aloha, buonasera, and Happy Memorial Day from Martha’s Vineyard, where the only thing thicker than the fog hovering over the waters off Oak Bluffs is the all-consuming sense of despondency after two gut punches delivered today by the world of sports: first, the death at age 71, after a long fight with cancer, of Bill Walton, who in his all-too-brief prime was one of the greatest and most dynamic centers ever to play roundball, and a true American original and flat-out hilarious national treasure on and off the court; and then the first-round French Open loss of the once-magnificent, forever-rad Rafael Nadal in what he’s told the world will be his last go-round at Roland Garros. Godspeed and the biggest ups, Rafa—whatever comes next for you, sir, all right-thinking humans will always be in your debt for giving us the most glorious tennis match in history and countless other moments of on-court mastery, tenacity, grit, endurance, and unfailing, unrelenting class.

In tonight’s special holiday Monday night issue of The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic, we survey the fallout from the political event of the weekend: the Libertarian National Convention, at which both Donald J. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made unprecedented, highly touted, much-watched appearances (in the political world, at least)… and fell flat on their faces.

But first…

🎧 Trump Trial, cont’d: In my previous column, I violated the cardinal rule of covering any American legal proceeding, which is that absolutely everything will invariably take longer than you possibly think it could (or, by all rights, should). Though I correctly predicted that the prosecution and defense would both rest last week, I also forecast that closing arguments in the case would take place before the long weekend. As the late, great John McLaughlin was wont to say to Freddy “the Beadle” Barnes (and Dana Carvey delighted in mocking on SNL): Wrong! Closing arguments, along with Judge Juan Merchan’s instructions to the jury, will take place this week… promise!

By the by, if you’re interested in hearing more from me about the politics of the Trump trial, I chatted about that topic (and much more) with two of my estimable Puck partners, Peter Hamby and Tara Palmeri, on their respective podcasts, The Powers That Be and Somebody’s Gotta Win. And for even more on the trial, don’t miss this weekend’s #mustread from the NYT’s Haberman and Swan on Trump’s post-verdict playbook, or the paper’s triple-bylined deep dive into the defense team’s likely closing-argument focus on former Trump Organization C.F.O. Allen Weisselberg and his glaring absence from the prosecution’s witness list.

👐Wu-Tang in the House: As I recounted to Hamby on TBTB, I recently ran into House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries in D.C. and mentioned a clip I’d caught somewhere on social media of him being asked by a California TV anchor to name his favorite rap lyric—causing Jeffries to uncork a smooth, word-perfect rendition of a few bars of Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.,” which is, FYI and FWIW, undeniably one of the greatest tracks in the history of hip-hop. Well, the aforementioned interviewer heard the pod and shot me a nice email, so credit where due to Elex Michaelson, Fox 11 Los Angeles anchor and host of The Issue Is, the TV show and podcast on which Jeffries turned in his Wu homage. And, of course, props to Hakeem himself, who beamed with pride, and rightly so, when I mentioned how tight it was… as you can see for yourself here.

💲Speaking of C.R.E.A.M.: If you’re not already a Puck subscriber, you’re receiving this edition of Impolitic as a welcome gift to new readers. But the low low price of free gratis won’t last much longer—so click here to claim the sweet discount my overlords are still graciously offering to JH friends and #fam on either an annual or Inner Circle membership. In the meantime, have a great (short) week, see you back here on Sunday, and, as always, namaste!

And now to the main event…

Taking place at the Washington Hilton—best known as the site of another legit shitshow, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner—and bearing “Become Ungovernable” as its official theme, the Libertarian convention unfolded over four days, the last of which, Sunday, revolved around the selection of the party’s presidential nominee and was televised live by C-SPAN. On the (I hope and trust entirely safe) assumption that no one reading Impolitic was batty enough to watch much, if any, of the proceedings live, I offer this account.

After seven hours of unruly deliberations, the Libertarian faithful entered a seventh round of elimination voting faced with a choice between a dude you’ve never heard of—a 38-year-old former Democrat, Chase Oliver, who styles himself as “armed and gay”—and NOTA (none of the above). This fateful moment only arrived after a sixth round in which Oliver edged out his principal rival, a 65-year-old former professor, Michael Rectenwald, who left NYU in 2019 amid controversy over having hosted Milo Yiannopoulos as a guest speaker and who admitted on Sunday that his dotty performance at an earlier press conference was the result of an edible he scarfed beforehand. (“How high are you?” someone shouted from the crowd; “Not high enough,” Rectenwald replied; and, hey, watching on the tube, I knew the feeling.) In the end, although NOTA put up a valiant fight, claiming fully 37 percent of the vote, Oliver emerged triumphant. In his acceptance speech late Sunday night, he vowed that, if elected, he would abolish the Fed, “stop the thieving” represented by federal taxation, and begin the process of “set[ting] the world free in our lifetimes.”

But Oliver also offered a pointed message aimed directly at the pair of interlopers—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald J. Trump—who had crashed the convention earlier in the weekend, and who were, in fact, the central reason that the political class was paying attention to the Libertarian convocation in the first place. Having attacked Trump head-on following the former president’s speech the night before (“You are not a libertarian, Donald Trump; you’re a war criminal and you deserve to be shamed by everyone in this hall”), Oliver used his acceptance speech to take on the bearer of the most hallowed monicker in modern Democratic politics: “Rule number one: If you want to elect a real political outsider, don’t elect somebody with the last name Kennedy.”

Instead, the appearance turned into a uniquely Trumpian spectacle, in which the former president was roundly booed, heckled, and mocked by the delegates (some in t-shirts reading TRUMP/FAUCI 2024: GIVE US ANOTHER SHOT), prompting him to march through a series of increasingly desperate moves to try to quell the hostility he encountered: first, gratuitous pandering (“I’ve been indicted by the government on 91 different things, so if I wasn’t a libertarian before, I sure as hell am a libertarian now”); then, attempted favor-trading (vows to appoint a Libertarian to his cabinet and to commute the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the infamous dark web drug clearinghouse Silk Road); and, finally, frustrated mockery of the very people he was there to court: “I’m asking for the Libertarian Party’s endorsement, … [but] only do that if you want to win. If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your three percent every four years.”

The pièce de résistance, however, didn’t come until the next day, when the party chair ruled Trump ineligible even to compete for the party’s nomination because his campaign had failed to file the necessary paperwork. (In an impressive showing of grassroots strength, he still received six write-in votes in the first round, five more than Stormy Daniels, Denali—the cat mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska—and both Sean Ono Lennon and Afroman.) Undeterred as usual by either reality or the words that had issued forth from his own pie-hole the night before, Trump attempted to explain the pratfall with a post on Truth Social: “The reason I didn’t file paperwork for the Libertarian Nomination, which I would have absolutely gotten if I wanted it (as everyone could tell by the enthusiasm of the Crowd last night!), was the fact that, as the Republican Nominee, I am not allowed to have the Nomination of another Party.”

To which there can only be one sane reply: LOL.

To date, the R.F.K. campaign has secured a place on the ballot in just six states, though it claims to have nine more moving through the pipeline. But the Libertarian line is already established in 38 states, making the party’s nomination valuable to Kennedy on many levels, including his argument for inclusion in next month’s Biden-Trump debate.

Even so, for reasons known only to whomever has access to the bumper-car arena of contradictory and often incoherent thoughts banging around inside his head, Kennedy persisted for months in playing coy about whether he would ultimately throw his hat into the Libertarian ring after all. Indeed, last week, he told CNN that he wouldn’t.

And yet, Kennedy delivered his own address to the convention on Friday (drawing fewer jeers than Trump but still receiving a reception no sentient being would have interpreted as warm). Meanwhile, his elusive running mate, Nicole Shanahan, was slated to address the delegates on Sunday; and when Kennedy’s name was placed in nomination that morning—an ostensible surprise—the candidate was at the ready with a warm acceptance of what he described in a social media post as an “unexpected honor” and a “high point of my campaign.”

A few minutes later, however, first-round voting began and WHAM-O—the Libertarians slammed the door right in Kennedy’s kisser, giving him just 19 votes, or precisely 2.07 percent of the total. Almost immediately, Shanahan’s convention appearance was canceled without explanation. And with that, the dream of a Cato Institute-sponsored Camelot came crashing to the ground.

All of which may, in the end, add up to not much at all when November rolls around. Inside both the Biden and the Trump operations, the threat posed by Kennedy is the focus of a mounting sense of fear and loathing, as his poll numbers continue to rise (to 16 percent nationally in polls last month by CNN and Quinnipiac, and 17 percent in another highly reputable survey from Marquette Law School), along with pervasive uncertainty about which of the two major-party nominees his candidacy potentially hurts more.

But that rising sense of fear and loathing augurs a new phase in the campaign: one in which Kennedy is about to find himself on the receiving end of not one but two Dresden-scale, opposition-research-fueled fire bombings simultaneously, a double-barreled strafing that promises to be more severe and incendiary than anything we’ve yet seen on the presidential battlefield in our lifetimes.

Combine that with the tactical ineptitude and strategic confusion on display by Team Kennedy this weekend, and a sensible person might be tempted to wonder if the R.F.K. bubble has reached the point that the Ross Perot bubble did back in the summer of 1992, right before the unhinged, bat-eared billionaire started ranting about conspiracies involving shadowy, unnamed Republican operatives to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. The point at which, in other words, the bubble is about to pop.

We live in strange, surreal, screw-loose times, heaven knows. So much so that maybe the old rules of presidential politics have been rendered basically inoperative, and the system will prove more tolerant of (or even receptive to) the strange, surreal, screw-loose, conspiracy-addled candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But if I were a betting man—and praise Jeebus that I’m not; even someone with a constitution of a mule shark and a mind as rare and sharp as the Hope Diamond can only survive so many all-consuming addictions—I’d be sorely tempted to start making book now on whether, when all is said and done, R.F.K. actually winds up having appreciably more impact on the 2024 outcome than young Chase Oliver.